


A Mirror, Darkly

by Anonymous



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betrayal, Book 4: Broken Homes, Dimension Travel, Gen, Redemption Arcs, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:21:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29094939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Skygarden is Lesley's moment of decision. She never expected to make that decision twice.
Relationships: Lesley May & Thomas Nightingale, Peter Grant & Lesley May
Comments: 5
Kudos: 14
Collections: Five Figure Fanwork Exchange 2020





	A Mirror, Darkly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xenocuriosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xenocuriosa/gifts).



Lesley had seen video of controlled demolitions. She probably should have been prepared. But it turned out none of her experience, even a front-row seat to a magical duel between WWII-trained practitioners, compared to watching the collapse of a twenty-six floor building from well inside what she would have called a safe perimeter.

That didn’t explain the way her vision whited out as Skygarden came down. She doubled over, clutching her gut like the blast had been a kick to the midsection.

The fact that Peter had just jumped off the roof might have had something to do with the reaction, but she liked to think she’d kept her cool through worse. And not even Peter’s idiocy could explain the faint, familiar laughter echoing in the back of her head.

Lesley straightened, gasping. The dust began to settle. She looked around for the probationary constable who’d been standing at her elbow, but she was nowhere to be found, so Lesley took off at a run, calling Peter’s name. No response. She made for the corner of the building where she’d felt a burst of magic—something involving _aer_ , she thought—and kept blinking until she saw them: Peter, alive and well and putting a pair of handcuffs on the Faceless Man.

Peter was too busy making his arrest to see Lesley, but the Faceless Man caught sight of her right away. Their eyes met over the masks, and he tilted his head as though in question.

So Lesley walked up behind Peter and tasered him in the back of the neck.

As Peter twitched on the ground between them, the Faceless Man straightened, turned, and looked at her again. He shook off the cuffs with a twist of magic and cocked his head slowly to the other side, assessing. “Thank you.”

They didn’t have time for pleasantries. She was about to say as much, but then he raised his hand.

Lesley didn’t recognize the _formae_ he was gathering, but she didn’t really need to—the spell felt straightforward and powerful and carried that shrieking metal edge, and he was pointing it right at Lesley.

She got the taser back up and fired its secondary charge just as he released. The spell knocked her back and off her feet anyway, so she didn’t get to watch him twitch in the fetal position. Instead she hit the ground too hard for any reaction more complex than, _You fucker_. The despair hit a second later. What had she expected?

By the time she could sit up, the Faceless Man was nowhere to be seen. The prongs must not have attached well enough to give him a full dose. Bastard. Peter was already lurching to his feet, unhooking his own taser from his vest as he did.

Lesley didn’t have a hope. She let the beginnings of a fireball dissolve and put up her hands.

“What the hell,” said Peter, and the thing that seemed likeliest to break her was that he sounded furious, even shocked, but not half as betrayed as Lesley felt.

Peter took a second to cough into his shoulder, but neither hand wavered. One was covering her with the taser, and the other tingled in her consciousness with a half-formed spell.

“Right,” he said. “That’s it. Don’t move. Just—don’t move, don’t say a word unless I tell you to. My boss will be here any minute.”

That should have made her wonder. _My boss_ , not _Nightingale_ , and anyway they both knew perfectly well Nightingale was in Essex. It didn’t make sense, but it was hard to think past the roaring fury in her ears.

His next order almost snapped her out of it, though. “Take off your mask. Slowly.”

“Fuck you,” Lesley said. She was too surprised to be hurt. It was a kind of petty she’d never have expected from him.

“I said,” Peter repeated, “take off your mask,” and she could have screamed, but what was the point? What was the point in anything, now?

Lesley took off her mask. Then, on Peter’s face, she saw the wide-eyed shock and horror she’d last seen when she walked barefaced out of the Goblin Fair into a crowd of strangers.

“Right,” Peter said, even hollower than a mouthful of dust could account for. “Okay. Now tell me your name.”

“Peter—”

“That’s Constable Grant, to you.”

She couldn’t make any of this into sense. Sure, he probably had the right, but—

Then she really looked at him. All she saw was grim determination. Still no betrayal, and no recognition at all.

“Peter,” she said again, “it’s me.”

“Right,” he repeated, blankly. “I don’t think we’ve met, but—we’ll have to catch up later. I’m arresting you for assault of a police officer and interfering in an arrest.”

Probably she should have told him her name at that point or asked to show him her warrant card. There were lots of things Lesley should probably have done. Instead she sat back wearily on her heels and waited for the cavalry to arrive.

***

They kept her sitting in the interview room for ages. The delay was mostly an interrogation tactic—Lesley would have done the same. She hoped, though, that at least part of it was because they were as confused as she was.

While they were waiting for backup, Lesley had stopped being so rattled she couldn’t think straight and decided the fall must have left Peter with a serious concussion. That reassuringly simple conclusion had fallen apart when they arrived at Walworth nick and she got a similar reaction from a definitely un-concussed sergeant there, even though she’d met him twice during this case. She thought about asking for Nightingale, but he was bound to be back soon anyway, and she wasn’t sure if she was hoping he’d recognize her or not. She gave up and dropped her head in her hands.

At least they’d let her put the mask back on.

The wait gave her too much time to think. She wasn’t ready to deal with everything that had happened after she tasered Peter. So instead she focused on everything that came before.

The thing was, she hadn’t made up her mind yet. She was supposed to have more time. The Faceless Man hadn’t been in any rush for her to tip Peter and Nightingale off, and Lesley was still weighing her options. She’d talked to him, she’d passed some information, sure, but she’d been careful. Definitely not careful enough to keep her job, maybe not careful enough for Peter ever to trust her again, probably not careful enough to avoid legal trouble, but she was pretty sure if the worst happened she would have been able to turn Queen’s evidence and get off light. At most, she’d compromised an investigation or two. She hadn’t yet crossed what Peter would call the moral event horizon. Her plan was to string along the Faceless Man until she knew his offer was good, putting off the moment when she had to make a choice. When she did, it was supposed to be a deliberate one. Not forced under pressure.

Lesley wondered if the Faceless Man had put her in that position intentionally. She didn’t think so. He tended not to account for Peter.

When they finally started the interview, there were no tapes in the recorder, and nobody had mentioned lawyers. Officially unofficial, then. Peter sat across from her. She wasn’t sure if putting him in the room was rank stupidity on their part or the best possible approach. The only other person present was a woman, mid-forties, dark hair in an old-fashioned chignon. She wore a slim skirt suit of herringbone tweed, and her face caught oddly at the back of Lesley’s mind, but since this wasn’t quite official she hadn’t introduced herself. Anyway, Lesley was thinking more about Peter.

He took a sip of what she knew was terrible coffee. “You claim to be PC Lesley May.”

“I am. Peter, you know me.”

“I know Lesley May,” he agreed, which was more information than you should probably give a witness at the beginning of an interview, much less a suspect, but these were special circumstances.

Also, it didn’t make bloody sense. “You’ve seen my warrant card. Did they run my prints?”

“Yes.” He stopped to stare for a bit. Maybe he recognized her eyes, if nothing else. The woman in the corner cleared her throat, and Peter shook his head. “We’ll get back to that. What were you doing at Skygarden today?”

“I’m on an undercover investigation. With you. We were looking into a book that belonged to Erik Stromberg.”

“What book?”

“I don’t speak German,” Lesley said. “Something about the practical use of magic.”

Peter made a note. She couldn’t tell if it was just for show. “So you claim you were there with me, not—anyone else?”

“Not the Faceless Man, if that’s what you mean,” she said promptly. “That was a surprise. We knew he was involved, that he was planning something involving Skygarden, but we didn’t know exactly what or when he intended to move.” All true. Her association with the smarmy git wasn’t so advanced that he invited her to strategic meetings.

Peter had been studiously looking between his notebook and Lesley’s eyes. Now he dropped his gaze, taking in the mask. “What happened to your face?”

“Peter,” said the woman in the corner. Lesley thought she knew the voice, but she couldn’t place it.

“If you’re Lesley May,” said Peter, ignoring the interruption the way he always ignored orders and good sense when something had really gotten to him, “then something terrible has happened to your face since we went for drinks two nights ago. What was it?”

Lesley’s head was already spinning. Now she wanted to put her head between her knees. Instead she made herself stay upright and breathe carefully through her mouth. Part of her wondered, distantly, when the smell of hypoallergenic plastic and face cream had become familiar. Not quite reassuring, but it steadied her. “It was a revenant,” she said, “named Henry Pyke.”

There was a faint intake of breath in the corner, so quickly suppressed she nearly missed it. Peter wasn’t as good at hiding his shock. “We exorcised Pyke almost a year ago.”

“May of 2012,” she said. “That’s when I lost my face. You were there.”

He clearly had no idea what to say to that. Judging by the woman’s continued silence, that made three of them.

“That’s not what I remember happening,” Peter said at last.

“Yeah. I’m getting that.”

After a minute, he closed his notebook and sat back in his chair, just staring. It was Peter, her Peter as she’d last seen him just before everything went to hell, with the addition of some minor abrasions and smears of brick dust he hadn’t managed to get out of his hair and clothes. Peter, looking at her like he’d never seen her before.

“Are you a practitioner?” he asked. He must have felt the fireball she hadn’t quite had time to get together.

Lesley nodded. The woman spoke up, finally, from the corner. “Show us.”

“Ma’am—” Peter started.

“Go on,” said the woman, her cool grey eyes fixed calmly on Lesley. She’d settled back in her seat, legs crossed elegantly in the plastic station chair.

Lesley put her hand palm-up on the table and, very slowly, opened it to reveal a perfect, pearlescent werelight.

Lesley closed her hand again. “Who taught you to do that?” the woman asked.

“Peter did,” Lesley said flatly. “He didn’t realize that’s what he was doing, but he showed me a few times, and I went from there.”

“Ma’am, I didn’t.”

“Your _signare_ has a great deal in common with hers,” the woman said. She was frowning. “Such as it is, at your stage of training. But there’s another influence, too. If I didn’t know better, I would say it felt like my own.”

Lesley had known, must have known, since the woman had first opened her mouth. Because the voice wasn’t the same, but the tone was. That repressive _Peter_ that meant _Keep to the interrogation plan_ , or _Stop messing about and pay attention_ , or, most often, _Do try to focus_. “You’re Nightingale,” she said.

“I am,” the woman said. “But Lesley May wouldn’t need to be told.”

It was weirdly difficult to look at her. The long-boned face, the color but not the cut of the hair, even the posture were just too close to the person Lesley had sat across from at the breakfast table for months, and the whole uncanny valley thing wasn’t helping either her nausea or the oncoming headache.

So she watched Peter instead. “I do know Nightingale. After Peter talked Henry Pyke into taking my face instead of killing me outright, I went on medical leave. Then I moved into the Folly and started my apprenticeship. Under DCI Thomas Nightingale.”

He flinched at the reference to her face, but then confusion turned to realization and landed—because he, at least, was still perfectly Peter—on wonder.

“Fuck me,” he said, “you’re from an alternate universe.”

***

Not everyone was ready to accept his hypothesis, but also nobody insisted on locking her up. Nightingale clearly thought there was a chance she was telling the truth, and maybe accidental universe-hopping was enough reason to get disorientated and taser your partner instead of your suspect. Lesley’d followed it up by tasering the suspect, too, even if he’d got away, so that was a point in her favor.

Lesley knew she wasn’t lucky enough for that to be the end of it, but if it meant they could delay further conversation about tasers, the Faceless Man, and the confusing three-way scuffle she claimed had occurred in her own reality, she’d take it.

The other reason, though nobody said this either, was that there were no cells or custody sergeants capable of holding a Falcon-capable suspect. So back to the Folly she went.

“Which room did you stay in before?” Peter asked. “We can ask Molly to clean out the same one. You know Molly, right?”

“Has she tried the lamb in sardine sauce yet?”

He laughed. “Why would _that_ stay constant across multiple realities? I’m still trying to work out why it happened in this one.”

This gave them two safe, or nearly safe, topics of conversation: Molly’s cooking, and the differences between their timelines.

They established quickly that almost everything was the same. Major politicians and historical events, at least as far as they could both reliably remember. Peter’s life and Lesley’s both followed exactly the same path they both knew up until a murder in Covent Garden at the end of their probations. That led into dangerous territory, though, so Peter switched to history and pop culture. That was frustrating, because whenever he did find a discrepancy, it was difficult to put it down to the timelines instead of faulty memory or the fact that she just didn’t pay attention to a lot of the things he thought it was reasonable to ask about. The invention of the supercomputer, for example, or the plot of _Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_.

The two differences they could be absolutely certain of were that in 1900, Thomasina Nightingale had been born into a family of three brothers and two sisters; and in January of 2012, Mr. Punch had auditioned someone else for the role of Pretty Polly.

“Am I still with the Murder Team?”

“It was supposed to be a temporary assignment,” Peter said, “but Seawoll never let you go.”

“Yeah,” said Lesley, around a furious knot in her throat. “Sounds about right.”

In this reality, PC Lesley May had become one of the Murder Team’s de facto Folly liaisons, but she hadn’t been involved enough in their current operations to go undercover with Peter. As best anyone could tell, she’d been near Skygarden with her airwave on when the Major Incident was called in and had arrived onsite just before the collapse. After that, there was no sign of her.

“Does that mean our Lesley popped up in the same spot in your reality?” Peter asked. “Or—if we go with the many-worlds quantum theory, just for argument’s sake—did she get shifted one universe in the other direction? An infinite set of Lesley Mays, all displaced at the same instant.”

“The Newtonian tradition doesn’t have much to say about quantum mechanics,” said Nightingale. She’d just rejoined them after an extended phone conversation with Belgravia, for the duration of which she’d not-so-subtly tasked Peter with keeping an eye on Lesley. “Or, as you put it, alternate universes. I know there were efforts made to reconcile magic with newer scientific theories in the middle of the last century, but that was before the war, and none of that work made it into the accepted literature. Which isn’t to say there aren’t notes lying about here that might be relevant to the question.”

“David Mellenby’s notes?” Lesley asked, mostly to get a reaction. That combination of accent and turn of phrase and not-quite-Nightingale was still throwing her off balance.

What she got was narrowed eyes. “Yes.”

“So, research,” Peter said in satisfaction.

“Peter,” Nightingale said—in exasperation. “We have several open murder cases to wrap up to our colleagues’ inevitable displeasure. A tower block has just been demolished, and I’ve heard rumblings of a counter-terrorism operation. The Faceless Man has, once again, escaped us. Your attention is needed elsewhere while I sort this out.”

“What about me?” Lesley asked.

Nightingale looked at her, unsmiling. “You are my responsibility.”

“I’m not your apprentice,” Lesley said. “You don’t have to take me under your wing.”

“Your developing _signare_ would beg to differ,” Nightingale replied, instead of saying what Lesley knew she wanted to say—that she hadn’t just meant as an apprentice.

Nightingale didn’t trust her. Fair enough. She’d tasered Peter, and even if Peter himself seemed ready to forgive and interrogate, Nightingale was the same degree of suspicious no matter what timeline she’d been born in.

“So what are you going to do with me?” Lesley asked. “Send me back?”

“If that can be done,” Nightingale said. “For now, I’ll settle for working out exactly how you got here.”

Their working theory, meaning Peter’s working theory which Nightingale hadn’t yet managed to disprove, was that the simultaneous release of magical energy when both realities’ _Stadtkrone_ s had imploded at exactly the same time had managed to punch a temporary hole between those realities. That didn’t explain why only Lesley had been affected, though, particularly because she hadn’t been the closest person to the center of the blast in either universe.

Lesley had her own theory about that, but she wasn’t ready to share it yet. And definitely not with Nightingale.

“In the meantime,” Nightingale went on, “you’re more than welcome here. As you see, there’s plenty of space.” Lesley really wanted to ask if she’d confused _welcome_ with _house arrest_. “But DCI Seawoll wants to speak with you sooner rather than later.”

Of course he would, if she was still on the Murder Team. She wished she knew Seawoll better. Ever since she got off medical leave, he’d kept her at arm’s length like the rest of the Folly. Here, they must have a working relationship. Professional respect. Mentorship, for the kind of policing she’d always wanted to do.

“Once he’s satisfied, or as satisfied as he’s likely to get, I believe we can handle the professional side of your situation. Other matters may be more difficult to disentangle.”

“Your flatmate’s out of the country for the rest of the month,” Peter said. “So you won’t need any excuses there. I’ve got a spare key, so you can stop by and get some clothes.”

“I suggest,” said Nightingale carefully, “it would be best if Constable May didn’t leave the premises for the time being, unless it’s in my company.”

“Ma’am, you don’t really think—”

“What either of us thinks is immaterial,” Nightingale said. “We don’t know anything except that we have another practitioner on our hands under extremely unusual circumstances. Until I’m better satisfied as to the nature of those circumstances, I want her close. Surely she can give you a list of belongings to pack.”

“Ma’am,” Peter said again, after what looked like a difficult moment.

Nightingale sighed, then turned to Lesley. “I understand this situation is trying for you, but since your investigation into the Faceless Man seems to have proceeded very much in parallel with our own, I hope you in turn will understand the need for caution.”

“Sure,” Lesley said. “No argument here.” Because she really didn’t have a good one.

Peter frowned. “ _Has_ it proceeded in parallel? We got to Skygarden at the same time. What about everything else?”

Nightingale sat up straighter, letting her cup settle in its saucer. They’d been sitting in the breakfast room, which aside from being one of the more neutral locations in the Folly was an excellent place for the coffee they all desperately needed, since it was getting on toward midnight. Lesley was glad Molly’d been able to scrounge up a straw. She didn’t need to watch Peter try not to look at her face just now. “That,” Nightingale said, “is an excellent question.”

Peter turned his frown on Lesley. “How did you wind up looking into Stromberg? Was it Richard Lewis?”

“Peter,” said Nightingale, clearly about to object to the transmission of any information in an outward direction, but Lesley had just remembered something and was looking around in case Molly might have hidden a Soviet lieutenant under one of the salvers on the sideboard.

“Wait,” she said. “Where’s Varvara Sidorovna?”

Peter blinked. “Who’s that?”

Varvara Sidorovna, by the time they got out to the farm in Essex the next morning, was nowhere to be seen. Neither were the minions, but they’d left enough demon traps and other surprises to keep Nightingale busy sweeping the place for an hour while Peter and Lesley cooled their feet in the Jag. She’d offered to help, but Nightingale was unimpressed.

“Not until Abdul’s had the chance to take some scans and give you a clean bill of health,” she said, which sounded nicer than _like hell are you doing magic, you tasered my apprentice_.

“We had this place as an action item,” Peter explained while Nightingale finished clearing the farmhouse. He’d let slip that Sky’s murderer had been dumped in a grass verge off the A113, lungs filled with water, just like Lesley remembered. “But Nightingale didn’t want me going so far alone, not when we thought the Faceless Man was involved, and she hadn’t had time yet. And then, you know. Things escalated.”

“This was never going to work with a two-person team,” Lesley mused.

“I’ve been telling her that for the last year,” Peter agreed. “Ever since—anyway.” Since Henry Pyke, Lesley thought. “I think she’s starting to come around.”

“Which direction do you think I’ll push her in?”

“Jury’s out.” They both fell silent as the prickle of magic washed over them from a distance. There was no light, no sound from the farmhouse’s windows. Just the measured tick of Nightingale at work. “Does her _signare_ feel the same as the other Nightingale’s?”

Lesley had just been trying to decide. “The flavor’s a little different, but the shape’s the same. Wet wool instead of damp canvas, I think. You’ve always been better at sensing it than me.”

“I never really thought about it,” he said, struck by the idea. “What you’d be like, as a practitioner. I suppose everyone’s got their own style.”

“You can keep your nose for _vestigia_. I’m better in the shooting range.”

He snorted. “That’s big talk from someone who’s not allowed to do magic.”

“Convince her to let me show you, and we’ll find out.” Another rippling spell tickled the edge of her awareness. It was all so tame in comparison to the last time Lesley had been here. Then, because she’d just thought of a way to drive Peter absolutely crazy, she added, “Nightingale dueled Varvara Sidorovna in my timeline.”

She could actually feel the weight of Peter’s attention shifting her way. “She what?”

“He. You heard me—there was a duel.”

“But what does that even look like?”

So she told him, for the sheer pleasure of watching his jaw drop. By the time Nightingale came back out, he was practically vibrating with frustration.

“They didn’t leave us much,” Nightingale said, absentmindedly tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. She wore a trouser suit today in deference to the outing, with butter-soft leather shoes almost too low to be called heels. Lesley hadn’t yet seen her in makeup or jewelry, if you didn’t count the slim wristwatch. Her ears didn’t even seem to be pierced. None of which was that unusual in their line of work, but for a woman of Nightingale’s age and with her—his—fashion sense in general, it surprised Lesley. “It’s safe enough to call in an evidence team. They might find something to tell us where to look next. The idea of a Night Witch roaming freely, and in the employ of our faceless friend, is concerning.”

Peter was staring at her like he was trying to visualize the barn ripping in two. Nightingale didn’t even seem to notice. That answered the question about whether his tendency toward hero-worship translated across dimensions and genders.

“Of course,” Nightingale added, thoughtfully, “perhaps Constable May has other suggestions to make.”

“About Tamonina? No idea where she would have gone. I know where she was before, though. Did you run across Albert Woodville-Gentle?”

“Yes,” said Peter. “But not until he was dead. Is there a connection?”

“This sounds like an enlightening conversation,” said Nightingale, “but it’s getting late, and Constable May has an early meeting with Inspector Seawoll tomorrow. Perhaps we should continue in the car.”

They were lucky Lesley had a more methodical mind than Peter did, and she could produce a concise and coherent narrative without letting him lead her down too many tangents. That was proper policework. She took them step-by-step through Woodville-Gentle and the Little Crocodiles, including Peter’s own conviction, as yet unchallenged by contradictory evidence, that Woodville-Gentle was the original Faceless Man.

“I hope you’re taking notes, Peter,” said Nightingale. “We need to corroborate as much of this as possible, and immediately.”

“I thought I was going to be busy with two murder investigations and a counter-terrorism operation.”

“You’re excused double practice tomorrow,” Nightingale said magnanimously. “You can make it up this weekend.”

The nice thing about the mask was that Peter couldn’t see Lesley’s smile at the sheer familiarity of the exchange, or her grimace when she realized she was smiling. She couldn’t let herself get too comfortable.

***

The interview next morning was about as painful as she’d expected. Nightingale drove her into Belgravia personally—still not letting Lesley off the leash—and endured Seawoll’s purple-faced welcome with the ease of long practice. (Lesley had wondered if he’d moderate himself at all with a woman of the same rank. She thought maybe there were fewer personal epithets, but the general mood and level of profanity didn’t change.) Nightingale agreed that she could fucking wait in the hall and settled in with the crossword as Lesley was ushered into the meeting room.

Seawoll looked across the table at her, then let out an enormous sigh. “What the fuck did they do to you, Lesley?”

She opened her mouth to protest that it hadn’t been _them_ , but she couldn’t say it. She didn’t even know if she believed it anymore.

Seawoll gave her a minute. He’d always been good in interviews. “They said it was that May Riot business.”

“Yes, sir. I understand it played itself out a bit differently for you.” She wondered if he’d been stuck full of tranquilizers in this timeline. She’d have to ask Peter—now didn’t seem like the time.

“Ten dead,” he said flatly. “Not to mention injuries after the damned opera. But you were well away from it, at the end.” Peter had said as much, because Lesley had wanted to know. Before the Coopertown baby, Nightingale had brought in a contact of hers from Charing Cross, a female sergeant who’d been seconded to the Folly for several cases in the past. That sergeant had died in the spring.

Seawoll’s eyes flicked down to her mask. She knew he wanted to ask. She’d been barefaced when they got her into the transit van after Peter arrested her; someone, probably not Peter, must have told Seawoll what she looked like. But people always thought they wanted to see for themselves.

“What did they do,” he said again, even more quietly. “All right, May, let’s have it. In your words. Nightingale says she’s told me all she thinks it would benefit me to know, which is fuck-all.”

When Lesley emerged half an hour later, feeling wrung out like a damp flannel, Nightingale returned Seawoll’s glower with a nod. “All right?” she asked once they were alone.

Lesley shrugged. “He’s putting me on medical leave.”

“Good. Appropriately enough, we have an appointment at UCH.”

“Great,” said Lesley. “All this morning needed was an MRI.”

The scans weren’t that bad, actually. The first time she’d found all the clanging a bit unnerving, but by now she was so used to it she tended to doze off. Nightingale introduced her to Dr. Walid as though they’d never met, which was an odd experience, but it was easier not to say anything. Afterward they all sat around while Walid made concerned noises and Nightingale asked precise questions. Lesley had heard all the answers before. The scan showed shadows that looked like minor lesions, particularly concerning in someone her age, and probably enough for a tentative diagnosis of something fun like multiple sclerosis if Walid hadn’t seen it before and if Lesley hadn’t been able to point her finger at the ghost of Henry Pyke.

“I’ve been practicing since last year,” she said eventually, when the walk down familiar ground had gone past tedious all the way to infuriating. “I’m careful. There’s been no progression.” _And I’ve had this argument with both of you, not to mention Peter, too many times to count._

“I have no way of confirming that,” said Dr. Walid. “You say in this—alternate timeline of yours—Thomasina doesn’t object?”

She could have corrected him at least twice over, but that wouldn’t help her cause. Besides, she’d heard the way he said _alternate timeline_ , and she knew he was itching to ring Peter and geek out about it. “Like I said, I’m careful.”

“Well,” said Walid, “I can’t say I’m thrilled with the idea. But if you come back for regular imaging, and if you follow a strict training protocol, I might be willing to sign off.”

That wasn’t what she’d been expecting, but not because of medical concerns. “Wait, you were serious?” she asked Nightingale. “You’re not going to lock me in the cellars and zap me next time I try a werelight?”

“That sounds like suboptimal utilization of resources,” said Nightingale, who had clearly been spending too much time around Peter in this dimension, too. “And if we don’t return you to your reality of origin in the near future, it would make it difficult for me to take a holiday.”

“Since when do you ever go on holiday?” Lesley asked, and Walid laughed.

As she parked the Jag in the Folly’s garage, Nightingale’s hand paused on the ignition. “I don’t intend to lock you in the cellars,” she said, “but neither have I decided to throw open our doors and allow a rogue practitioner to roam freely.”

“I’m not a rogue practitioner. I’m not even a hedge witch. You taught me.”

“I find it difficult to contradict that, not with your _signare_ as clear as it is. I am willing to allow that I had a hand in your training. That doesn’t mean you aren’t a risk.”

“Peter trusts me.”

“You tasered him in the back,” said Nightingale, the temperature in the Jag dropping noticeably. “You allowed the most dangerous criminal in the country to escape after he’d just executed a plan that could have resulted in mass casualties.”

“It was a mistake,” Lesley said. “I’d just been dumped into another dimension in the middle of an all-out magical fight, not to mention a collapsed building block. I hit the wrong person.”

“Peter has allowed his relationship with you to cloud his judgment.”

“While your judgment is always reliable,” Lesley retorted, then instantly regretted it.

Nightingale looked down at the steering wheel. “I accept that I’ve made errors in the past. Some of them recently. And I accept that in another version of reality, my failures may have caused you harm. I don’t know enough to say whether that requires an apology now.”

“You weren’t there,” said Lesley. She wasn’t sure which version of Nightingale she was talking to. “Don’t bother.”

“That said,” Nightingale resumed, “I’ve always tried to do my job to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge and ability. I can only work with the information I have in front of me. If that means I’m overcautious now, so be it.”

“Am I still being charged with something?”

“Not at the moment,” Nightingale said. “And I’m content to leave it that way, if you’re willing to let me take the precautions I think are necessary.”

“What did you have in mind?”

***

“Nice,” Peter said, when Lesley came down to breakfast two days later modeling a bracelet of fresh-forged steel and copper filigree around one wrist. “I don’t know whether it’s more steampunk or industrial chic.”

“It’s her ticket out of the Folly,” said Nightingale. “Temporarily, that is. Constable May, I’d still like you to notify me of your movements in advance, whenever possible.”

“Lesley,” she said. On balance, she thought it was probably to keep reminding Nightingale that in some other reality, she trusted Lesley. “No need to treat me different than Peter.”

“As you prefer,” said Nightingale. “When you’re here at the Folly and want to perform magic, I can remove the bracelet temporarily. That does mean we’ll need to coordinate our schedules.”

“What happens if I’m somewhere else and _need_ to perform magic?”

“Then the bracelet will set off an alarm, and I’ll go at once to your last reported location. I think we can operate under the assumption that any emergency requiring magic outside the Folly would also requiring my immediate presence.” Inconvenient, but Lesley could work with it. For now. “Would you like it removed for the morning? I’d planned to spend most of the day here.” Nightingale had been nose-deep in the library, sorting through texts on magical travel that might just possibly be related to multiple dimensions. Lesley couldn’t tell yet whether Nightingale thought she’d turn up any promising leads. For her own part, Lesley wasn’t sure how she felt about either option.

“Not yet,” Lesley said. “I thought I’d take Toby for a walk after breakfast.”

Nightingale looked surprised, but only for a moment. “Of course. I imagine you’re in need of some fresh air.” Then she finished her coffee, nodded to them both, and left the room.

Peter was still looking at Lesley’s wrist, probably to avoid looking at her face. She kept forgetting he wasn’t used to it. Nightingale hadn’t turned a hair, but then she’d seen worse. Probably. Maybe not over the breakfast table. Lesley wasn’t actually sure how this Nightingale had spent the war.

She thought of asking Peter if he knew. That was sure to distract him. Instead she said, “You can ask, you know.”

He looked guilty. “Ask what?”

“About my face,” she said. “We’ve done this before. I’ve heard all your questions. I don’t mind.” Which was at least half a lie, but he probably knew that.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not so much anymore except right after surgeries. Mostly it just itches.” And there was the occasional rash from the mask, if she wasn’t careful, but there was no need to go into unsavory detail.

“You’ve had a lot of surgeries?” She grimaced. “Did they help?”

“Mostly. I couldn’t really talk, back at the beginning.”

He’s looking kind of ill, but curious, too, because—Peter. “Is there more they can do?”

“Hopefully. A bit. I have the next one scheduled in a few weeks.”

“That’s going to be a problem, if you’re still stuck here,” Peter said.

She shrugged and didn’t say she’d probably have had to skip that one, anyway.

He was still thinking about it, though. “I bet Walid could put the fix in if we haven’t switched you back by then. Mock up some fake records if you need them, get you scheduled. He’s done weirder things for us.” He was right, if it came to that. They could sort the paperwork, like Seawoll had already started doing on the professional front. “If you’re still here, what will you tell your parents?”

Lesley had been trying not to think about it. “I don’t know. I hope I don’t have to. I’m not sure I can do this to them a second time.” Never mind that she’d been planning to do exactly that, in a different way.

Peter seemed to have forgotten his breakfast, which was turning into a congealed and cooling mess of eggs, tomatoes, and kedgeree. Now he looked down at his plate. “Was it my fault?”

Okay, that question was new. She looked away, the remains of her jaw working. “If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. I bet it was someone else, here. Did she survive?”

“That’s not what I asked,” Peter said. “I want to know if it was my fault. That it was you, not someone else.”

She wasn’t ready for this. “I was on the case anyway. Murder Team, you know. But mostly data entry. I only made it to the crime scenes because you and Nightingale were working the case. That doesn’t make it your fault. I wanted to come, not hang around at a desk.”

“And when—it happened? You said I was there.”

“Yeah,” she said. She wished she hadn’t had so much coffee. The acid burned the back of her throat. “You talked Pyke into giving me a chance. Bandaged my face and stalled for time until the medical team was there. I would have died, probably. Instead….” She made an abortive gesture with her fork.

Peter nodded. His own face was tight.

“My turn,” Lesley said, because she had every good copper’s resistance to being at the wrong end of an interrogation. “You and—me, the other me. Did we ever—”

“No!” he said, instantly converting the conversation into a completely different kind of awkward. She thought he was blushing. “I mean, I’d have been interested. You probably knew that. The other you. Why, did you—”

“No,” said Lesley, thoughtfully. “I just wondered. Something Nightingale said, about our relationship making you trust me when you shouldn’t. I guess that’s not what she meant.” It was, suddenly, a relief to be talking to this Peter. He’d seen her without her mask, now, but he hadn’t watched her face fall off, or seen her in hospital before they started reconstruction, or heard what passed for her voice before all the speech therapy. She hadn’t thrown herself at this Peter while she was pissed out of her mind. She didn’t remember most of that night, except for the part where she’d offered to wear a paper bag. She was glad he couldn’t remember it, either. She thought for a minute, then she looked him straight in the face. “I’m sorry I tasered you by accident.” Another lie, but she couldn’t tell if that applied to all or only half of it.

“I’m sorry your face fell off.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

And that would have been a nice, heartwarming note to end the conversation on, but it didn’t end there. Because Peter.

“Is there any chance magic could fix it?”

It took her quite a while to answer. “Nightingale says not. And Walid.” Then, in the interests of actually cutting things off, “You asked Bev, too. No luck there.”

“Beverley Brook?”

“One and the same,” said Lesley. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any farther with her in this reality.” Which proved a highly effective way of reminding Peter he had some reports to send to the Bromley Murder team.

After she’d cleared her plate, Lesley went to the kitchen, where she found both Molly and Toby.

“Hi,” she said. Molly nodded. When Nightingale had reintroduced the Folly’s most frequent visitor as a masked, semi-permanent tenant from another dimension, she’d taken it in stride. Or glide, whatever. It made a nice change.

Toby looked up from his bowl and barked. If anything, he’d been less impressed than Molly, but then he’d never been what Lesley would call discriminating in his tastes.

“I’m taking him out,” Lesley said. “Can I have his lead?”

That two-minute interaction was the closest thing to normal she’d experienced since Skygarden. Thank God for Molly.

Nightingale had been explicit on the route information on the Faceless Man was supposed to flow: from Lesley, to Nightingale and Peter. Not the other way around. But Lesley had been careful, and Peter hadn’t, so she knew more than Nightingale probably meant her to—references to leads that had never come up in the investigations she’d been part of. Names like Wanda Pourier and Reynard Fossman, and something that had happened at the pub called The Chestnut Tree. On the other hand, Peter and Nightingale knew less than they might have. Specifically, about the significance of the Crossrail works at Tottenham Court Road.

It was a clear, sunny day. Perfect for stretching her legs after far too long stuck indoors, letting Toby do his business, and completing a little reconnaissance.

Russell Square to the Tottenham Court Road Station was about half a mile as the crow flies. Lesley took her time, lingering outside the British Museum and making a detour to Soho Square Gardens. Then she doubled back toward the station, all the way to the end of Dean Street, where she got access to the basement of one of the shops by the simple expedient of carrying Toby in one arm and showing her warrant card with the other.

The fire door was intact. No sign Nightingale had blown her way in just after Christmas. No evidence the Faceless Man’s lair had ever been discovered. When Lesley placed her hand flat against the door and focused in her best Nightingale-approved fashion, she was almost sure she could sense the slight hum of magic.

All right, then. That was good to know.

That afternoon, Nightingale took the bracelet off and supervised Lesley and Peter taking out some serious pent-up aggression on the shooting range. Peter, because Bromley had a murder victim who’d been cooked to death and fuck-all to show for their investigation, and a lowly PC was exactly the person to bear the brunt of that frustration. Lesley, for even more obvious reasons.

“Not bad,” said Nightingale, when Lesley’s single, perfect fireball outperformed Peter’s handful of skinny grenades. Lesley wasn’t fast, not yet. But she was accurate.

“Would you mind giving a demonstration, ma’am?” she asked, surprising Nightingale for the second time that day. “I don’t know how different it would be from what I’ve seen before, but if it _is_ different, I might find it instructive.”

This was, of course, complete bullshit. Lesley was just curious.

“Very well,” said Nightingale, laying aside her jacket and rolling up the sleeves of the silk blouse she wore underneath. It was back to a skirt suit today. Lesley had started to suspect she preferred them, switching to trousers only out of professional convenience.

She stepped to the middle of the room and gave her shoulders a little roll. Nothing showy, just getting a kink out of her neck, and a moment later she was perfectly relaxed. The figure was different, the center of gravity a bit lower, but the tilt of the head, the flick of her wrist—Lesley had seen it a hundred times before.

She’d seen the effects of a signature Nightingale on a paper target, too. She barely spared the fireball itself a glance.

Nightingale turned back when she was finished, eyebrows raised.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Lesley.

“Of course,” said Nightingale. She picked up her jacket, then hesitated. “I may have some news for you this evening. We’ll talk after supper. I need a second opinion on a few passages first.” And, having dropped another kind of bombshell, she went upstairs.

Lesley’s attempts to work out how exactly she felt about that were interrupted by Peter, who _had_ been paying attention to the fireball. “Well?” Peter asked. “Does it measure up?”

“Yeah,” Lesley said. “Apparently some things don’t change.”

It was a Saturday, and with practice over, that seemed as good a time as any to retreat to the coachhouse, where she plied Peter with beer and everything she knew about Nightingale’s history. He was happy to reciprocate, but it turned out he had even less detail to offer. There had been no Casterbrook, of course, and no Captain Nightingale. As best Peter could work out, it had been the youngest of the Nightingale sons who’d taken up the practitioner’s mantle, and young Thomasina had somehow persuaded her brother to pass along everything he learned during the long holidays. The period between the wars was a bit of a blank, though Peter knew she hadn’t joined the police yet, and Lesley had to wonder how (based on what she knew of Thomas Nightingale) an otherwise-conventional woman in the first half of the nineteenth century had occupied herself without marriage or profession up until she hit her forties.

She’d been in London during the first part of the war, that much Peter knew, while her brother and most of the magical talent in Britain was off on the Continent. She’d come to the attention of the Folly at that point. “I don’t know the details, but at the end of December, 1940, there was a particularly heavy night of bombing,” Peter said. “I’m not sure how much you know about the Blitz—”

“The Second Great Fire,” Lesley said. “Obviously. Incendiaries started something like a thousand fires that night.” What she didn’t say was that she couldn’t remember if she knew that particular figure from school or from Peter’s tendency to serve up bite-sized pieces of local history at every opportunity. Speaking of things that never change.

Except Peter blinked, then frowned. “The what?” And they stared at each other a minute, Peter’s eyebrows climbing his forehead. “All right,” he said, “that’s—new, and apparently didn’t happen here. Or at least not the way you’ve heard about it. But there was a heavy night of bombing, lots of incendiaries, and whatever she did meant the Folly couldn’t conveniently ignore her anymore, or whatever they’d been doing, so they decided to recruit her instead.”

Nightingale had technically enlisted as a nurse, though Peter said she disclaimed any medical training. Someone had probably thought that was hilarious. “Was she at Ettersberg?”

She could practically see Peter’s ears perk up. “Yes. You know what happened there?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah,” he said, disappointed. “Figured as much.” He reached for the remote, and Lesley sat back in the couch, watching him out of the corner of her eye. He’d accepted her so readily, she didn’t know what to do with it. But then he’d been the one who’d interviewed a ghost in the first place, and he’d been the one who actually wanted to sign on for all this. She wondered if he’d have accepted his face falling off as easily as the rest of it.

When Nightingale sat them down that evening, she chose the mundane library. Lesley knew it was bad when the first thing she did was pour Lesley several fingers of brandy. Then she offered the same to Peter. It wasn’t the drink of choice for either of them, but Lesley didn’t quibble. She thought she might need it.

“Most writing on other realities is about the realms of the Fae, or others that operate under significantly different rules than ours,” said Nightingale. “This is a very different situation, and as I said, most of the work on it is speculative. I have, however, reviewed all the available literature. I also had a second opinion from Postmartin, and then a third from a retired practitioner in Herefordshire. We’re in agreement that there are no credible accounts of the type of travel Lesley has experienced, only a great deal of theory.”

“And what does the theory say?” Lesley asked. She wasn’t sure if Nightingale had been pausing for effect or she just needed that extra sip of brandy.

“According to what I’ve read, our initial hypothesis appears to be correct. The necessary components of the transfer are a significant—I will even say an overwhelming—release of magical energy in both dimensions, at precisely the same temporal and physical location. Or so multiple researchers seem to have believed. There are obvious difficulties with putting that theory into practice.”

Peter had a dangerous furrow between his eyebrows. Lesley interrupted before he could ask irrelevant questions. “How much energy does it need?”

“The amount you’d get if you stored up half a century of _vestigia_ from a block of London flats?” Peter asked.

Nightingale pulled a face, bringing one long hand up to rub at her temple. “The calculations involved are entirely beyond me. I know no-one living who would know where to start. But, in much less precise terms—yes, Peter, something on that order.”

Lesley’s hand tightened on her glass. “Is there anywhere we could get that amount of magical energy?”

“Without doing a major building project and waiting fifty years,” Peter put in. Lesley didn’t roll her eyes, but she was tempted.

“The short answer is no. Nothing I’m aware exists or ever existed. Skygarden was a singular ambition, not one I imagined had ever been formulated, much less achieved. I will, of course, make enquiries. But even we can access that sort of power, I would say that’s significantly less than half the battle.”

“They need to do it in the other reality, too,” Peter said, reaching Nightingale’s conclusion half a step ahead of Lesley. “At the same time, and in the same place.”

“Now,” Nightingale went on, when Lesley didn’t reply, “I think we may safely assume our—equivalents—in Lesley’s original reality are working through the same question we are, with the same motivation to find a solution. So I would not say we’re entirely without hope. But if we have no way to communicate with them, I can’t see how to put that solution into practice.”

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” said Peter. “Why Lesley? She wasn’t the only one at Skygarden in both versions of events.”

“As to that,” said Nightingale, watching Peter in a way that suggested she was really watching Lesley out of her peripheral vision, “I’ve asked Harold for a translation of the relevant passages, because I think we could benefit from your—unique perspectives on the question. My interpretation, which may be incorrect, is that the theorists believed there were two necessary qualities for the being undergoing the transfer. One was that they must be, in some recognizable way, identical. Lesley May in one reality, Lesley May in another, however divergent their experiences. So far, so clear. The next quality is more ephemeral. They theorized that the subject would need a strong affinity with the source of the power. In both respects, like calls to like.”

Peter sat back “An affinity with Skygarden? As far as I know, Lesley—my Lesley—had never even been there. Had you?”

“Not before this case started,” Lesley said, through a throat gone dry. She took a gulp of her brandy. It didn’t help. “Can’t say I felt much of a connection.”

Nightingale shrugged. “As I said, those passages will need particular attention. I’m sure I haven’t understood them fully. Besides that, unless we can resolve the first half of the problem, we may never need to know why Constable May was caught up in what I think we must conclude was a remarkable coincidence.”

“Remarkable,” Lesley repeated. “I suppose you could call it that.”

Nightingale winced again. “I’ve expressed myself badly.”

Lesley laughed. “I’m not sure there’s a good way to tell someone they’re trapped forever in another dimension and have to come up with some bullshit explanation for why their parents will never see their daughter’s face again. But if I think of one, I’ll let you know.” She tossed back the rest of her drink, then turned to Peter. “Want to blow up some more targets?”

“You’re at your limit for practice for the day,” said Nightingale quietly.

“You’re not my governor,” said Lesley. “Or my master. You’ve got no right.”

“Maybe not. But I do have the responsibility.”

“Fuck that,” Lesley said. Then she left.

***

Peter gave her a whole half hour to stew before he knocked on her door. She considered leaving the mask off when she answered, but any satisfaction she got from making him uncomfortable would be outweighed by having to watch him be uncomfortable. And besides, maybe this way he wouldn’t be able to tell she’d been crying.

He didn’t give her a chance to tell him to piss off. “Know what you need?” 

“To be left alone?”

“To get properly drunk,” he said. “Forget the brandy.”

She thought of the night he’d dragged her to the AB local. “I’m not going out.”

“Wasn’t suggesting you should. There’s always the tech cave.”

“I’m not getting drunk anywhere Nightingale’s going to see me, either.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Peter said in a way that made her wonder whether they’d had words, and if so, what exactly those words had been. She’d known Peter to put his foot down with Nightingale when he thought it was necessary. Sometimes it even worked. More often than not, actually—if Peter really thought something was worth arguing about, Nightingale tended to compromise. And he claimed Nightingale didn’t play favorites. Lesley’d sometimes changed his mind on the approach to a particular aspect of a case, but never about departmental policy, or what passed for it around here. Maybe this version would be more receptive. Or maybe this version would have, until—

“Oh, shit,” Lesley said, covering her eyes. “I just told a DCI to piss off.” It said something about the state she was in that not only had she done it, but it had taken her until now to process that potentially career-ending decision. It should probably have paled in comparison to everything else, and God knew it wasn’t the first time she’d wanted to give Nightingale a piece of her mind, but she’d always known there were limits.

“Relax,” said Peter, which was fine for him to say. “I don’t think she liked it, but she’s more worried than anything else.”

“Worried I’m going to stab you next time her back is turned.”

“That’s part of it,” he said. So he’d figured out he couldn’t lie to Lesley in this reality, too. “But you know she’s serious about the responsibility thing, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Everything’s been the Nightingale’s responsibility since nineteen forty-whatever. Look where it’s gotten the Folly.” Peter didn’t step back from the door, but he looked for a second like he wanted to. “Come on, you know there are problems. Remember what he wanted you to call him when you first signed on. Think about the Quiet People. A whole population underground that the Folly never even—”

“We went through that with Seawoll,” Peter said. “And I’m sure he said the same thing on your end, too. Yeah, there are problems. We’re working on them, but they’re there. She’s trying.”

“You really believe that?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

That, at least, Lesley believed. She sighed. “You said something about drinking.”

“I thought it might help to have some outside company,” Peter said as they walked downstairs. Nightingale and Molly were—all right, not _conspicuously_ absent, because the Folly was a big place. But they weren’t around. “But I can tell her not to come if you want.”

“Who, Bev?” The thought actually cheered her up for a moment. Beverley had never been weird about her face.

But he shook his head. “No, Caroline.”

“Who?”

“Caroline Linden-Limmer,” said Peter, giving her a surprised look. “Lady Caroline? You must have met her. I’ve even introduced you in this reality. She comes by whenever Nightingale’s got a bone to pick with her mum. Or the other way around—I can’t always tell.”

“No idea,” said Lesley, now genuinely curious. “What’d you tell her about me?”

“She’s a practitioner. So’s her mum. She’s seen some weird shit, so ‘alternate dimension’ went down easier than you might have expected. I didn’t tell her everything,” he added quickly. “She knows not to be surprised by the mask, though.”

Peter’d always been good that way.

Instead it was Lesley who got to be surprised when the door opened to reveal a tall Black woman she’d last seen wearing a hijab and a cleaner’s uniform. “Awa Shambir?”

The woman blinked, then looked to Peter. “Who’s that?”

“An alias, I’m guessing,” Lesley said. “You thought she was suspicious.” To Caroline, she said, “Have you ever worked for County Gard?”

“I’ve never even heard of it.”

Interesting. Peter clearly thought so, too, but for once he didn’t let himself get sidetracked. “No shop talk tonight,” he said firmly, walking over to pull open the door of the fridge. “Tonight, we drink.”

‘No shop talk’ didn’t stop them talking about magic, once Peter let drop Caroline was learning to _fly_. She stopped just short of a practical demonstration, partly because they had strict rules about that around Peter’s electronics but mostly because she was well into her third vodka tonic. Soon after, the evening devolved into another round of _spot the inter-dimensional differences_ , except this time someone—afterward, Lesley couldn’t quite remember who—suggested they try it with song lyrics. Which was how she ended up belting out track after track from her dad’s ska collection while Peter and Caroline argued over whether Lesley could reasonably be expected to remember all the words to “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Eventually they poured Caroline into a cab—or tried to, because she insisted in increasingly posh accents on walking out to the kerb herself, and did it well enough under the circumstances—and collapsed onto the couch.

“That wasn’t bad,” Lesley said, when she’d got what was left of her mouth into working order. “She’s not bad.”

Peter nodded, sprawled loose-limbed across more than his share of the cushions. She didn’t think he was as far gone as she was. “Thought you might get on.”

“You said you intro—int—said I met her.”

“Just a couple times. You don’t really know lot of the people who come over. ‘cept the ones you met in murder investigations. We don’t have all that many friends in common, actually.”

“We’re still friends, though, right?”

“Obviously we’re still friends,” Peter said. “You’re still my best mate. Little bit of dimensional travel’s not going to change that.”

If only he knew. She swallowed hard. “You want her back, though, right? The other one. Other Lesley.”

She could see him thinking he was far too drunk for this conversation. She thought maybe neither of them was drunk enough. “Doesn’t mean I don’t want you here. Doesn’t mean you’re not you.”

“It’s all right,” she said to the ceiling, so she didn’t have to look at him while she said it. “I want that Lesley back, too.”

They lay there in silence, the ceiling spinning slowly above them, until she was reasonably sure Peter’d fallen asleep. She heaved herself up, decided that sideways slump was probably going to be painful in the morning but not enough to move him, and covered him with one of the blankets. Then she made her slow and deliberate way back into the Folly proper.

She ran into Nightingale at the foot of the stairs, coming down for a glass of hot milk or what-the-fuck-ever Edwardian women drank in the middle of the night. She was wearing a long pinstripe dressing gown over what were definitely silk pajamas. “Ah,” she said, sounding as uncomfortable as Lesley’d heard her in either incarnation. Lesley was surprised she hadn’t recovered her cool yet. “Excuse me.”

“It’s your house,” said Lesley.

“Quite,” said Nightingale. She hesitated. “And yours, too.”

That was more of an olive branch than she’d been expecting. Lesley grit her teeth, then made herself say, “Sorry for earlier. Wasn’t appropriate.” She mostly got it out without slurring.

“I believe we may put it down to extenuating circumstances.”

“Still. Superior officer, and all that.”

“Then I accept the apology,” said Nightingale, “and hope you will accept that, as your superior officer and master in the art, I mind significantly less about the language you use to show your displeasure than I do about the care you take not to overdo your practice.”

“You do say ‘master’?” Lesley asked, because she was too drunk not to. “Not ‘mistress’.”

Nightingale actually smiled at that. “If British magic had long survived the war, I suppose its vocabulary might have adjusted to accommodate me. I don’t believe that term would have come into vogue, however. Even in the mid-century it had unfortunate implications. As, I’m reliably informed, does the masculine version, at least when used as a form of address.”

“Mmm,” said Lesley, and before the conversation could descend any farther into comparative terminology, she lifted her hand so the bracelet glinted in the low light. “So, if this is my house. Am I getting this off any time soon?”

“As soon as I’m entirely satisfied,” said Nightingale. “That isn’t an empty promise; you have my word. We will have to extend one another some patience.”

“Fair enough. Good night, ma’am.”

“Good night, Lesley.”

Lesley planned her next move out carefully. Fortunately, being on medical leave meant her time was pretty much her own. She took walks several times a day, making wider loops around the Folly each time. She brought a handful of treats that she could feed slowly to Toby, setting a pattern of staying in the same place for longer periods than he needed to deal with the call of nature. She didn’t know how actively Nightingale was checking the tracker, but she’d bet it was a lot.

Twice a day, she presented herself to have the bracelet removed and then restored after her twenty minutes of closely-supervised practice. It wouldn’t do to get rusty.

Peter was underfoot as much as the open investigations would allow, never bothering her to talk but making it agonizingly clear he was available if Lesley ever wanted to have another heart-to-heart. She didn’t, particularly. She didn’t think he wanted one, either, but she supposed it was nice to have the option on offer.

The seventh day after Skygarden, her route took her past Tottenham Court Road again, and this time she stopped long enough to leave a note.

She waited two more days to return. This time she went without Toby. Nightingale had never challenged her when she said she wanted to go out, and anyway, she figured it was time to put some of her eggs in a different basket and hope nobody blew up a building on top of it this time.

She’d set the appointment late that evening. It was almost the longest day of the year, so the sun hadn’t even really begun to set when she arrived. The shop was closed this time, but all the doors were unlocked. The fire door was heavy. She wished she could have resorted to _impello_ , but she couldn’t do that without burning bridges. Look where that had gotten her.

The Faceless Man’s ‘lair’, Peter had called it, and she’d thought at the time he was being melodramatic, but she did have to admit it looked like something out of a Bond film, that huge cylindrical shaft with its spiral staircase descending to the cement floor. He’d had a few more months to work on it, so now there were a pair of grilled metal platforms midway down, holding—nothing, as far as she could tell. Though given what he could do with his face, she wouldn’t have sworn they were empty as all that. She ignored the lift, like they had the last time, and took the stairs.

Waiting for her at the bottom, in the place they’d found the body of Albert Woodville-Gentle, was the Faceless Man himself.

He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his face upturned to her as she came down the last few flights. If she squinted, she could see the mask half-hidden by his illusion. “Hello,” he called.

“I came alone.”

“I know,” he said, amused. “I have eyes on the Folly. Much as I’d love to meet the Nightingale in person, I’d prefer to choose the time and place with more care. So you needn’t tell me she’s still at home. Do come down. I hate to shout.”

She took a long look around as she came level to him. The floor of the shaft also looked as empty as the last time she’d been here—emptier, without a corpse and its associated paraphernalia—but she had a funny sense that it wasn’t. The corners of the space had an odd sheen to them, like a soap film, and when she took a step toward one wall he cleared his throat.

“No farther, Constable May.”

“You looked me up?”

“I hope you won’t be offended if I tell you I hadn’t run across that name before you were so obliging as to sign it on that note. I know your friend Peter Grant, of course, but after Skygarden, I was unspeakably curious about the policewoman who gave me the chance to escape. Especially as she seemed to have some training, rudimentary as it was. None of my sources could identify you. Not even when I told them about the mask. Why do you wear it?”

“Not for the same reasons you do.” Lesley’d wondered about that, of course, back before they’d made contact. If Peter or Nightingale had thought he might have been hiding a deformity, they’d never suggested it to her.

“I’d gathered as much,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to take it off.” When she didn’t reply, he raised a hand and whispered something, and the velcro fasteners undid themselves. That was bad, but worse was the brush of his magic against her cheek, that razor-strop and smell of gunmetal. She held her ground against that, and against the considering sound he made as he approached her.

Up close, the Faceless Man didn’t reek of _vestigia_ half as much as she’d have expected. Mostly it was expensive cologne and clean, starched cotton. He’d taken the time to dress for her. She held her head still as he reached, fascinated, to take her chin. “Yes,” he said, slowly. “Yes, I begin to see.”

“I very much fucking doubt it,” said Lesley. “Touch me again and I’ll end you.”

“That’s the spirit,” he said, sounding delighted, but he did take an ostentatious step back. “I would truly welcome the attempt. But I don’t think that’s why you’ve come tonight. I understand you’re here to make an offer I can’t refuse. Do tell me all about it.”

“I know what you want,” said Lesley. “Some of it, anyway. I know it involves summoning Punch, and killing him.”

Even without being able to see his expression, she knew that hit home. He’d gone very still, suddenly, with a hint of the same intensity she sometimes got off Nightingale.

“I’ve got a certain interest in that. And I can help you do it. But only,” she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “if you give me something in return.”

“How do you know even that much of my plans?” He was still very close, and she could feel that metallic edge of _vestigia_. Or maybe it was just ambient noise from the rest of the place, spillover from whatever he was doing there. “I’ve told no-one. No-one still living, anyhow.”

“You told me yourself.”

That shut him up for a few seconds. But only a few. She’d never met anyone who enjoyed the sound of his own voice quite that much. “My dear Lesley—may I call you Lesley?—I’m quite certain I would have remembered that particular conversation.”

She drew a deep breath. She’d known she’d hate every second of the meeting, but this would be the worst of it. “What do you know about alternate dimensions?”

The reason that was the worst of it was that the Faceless Man was as big a nerd as Peter, but he was also an unimaginable dick about it. Not only did he believe her, he found her _fascinating_ , and he wasn’t shy of saying so. “You believe the reason you were chosen was your affinity with Mr. Punch?”

“I hear him sometimes,” she said. She’d never even told Peter that. “Laughing. I heard it at Skygarden. I think—it was the chaos, and all that power crashing down. He loved it.”

“And this affinity will make you useful to me?”

“That’s what you told me,” she said.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I can see how that might be true. I’ll need time to consider it. I’d invested a great deal in Skygarden, you know.”

“You had contingencies in place, though,” Lesley said, trying not to sound too desperate. He’d had those contingencies worked out well before Skygarden. That was why he’d reached out to her. He must have the same thing in mind here, too—or maybe he’d only thought of it because she’d been there to be used. “You said what you had planned for Punch would be bigger. Some kind of ritual intended for a particular time and place, involving massive amounts of magical energy, that could wipe him off the face of London.”

“Was that my side of the bargain?”

“Part of it.”

“Let me guess,” he said, his hand twitching like he wanted to raise it to her cheek again. “Your face.”

“Yeah,” Lesley said. “That’s what I want. My face. And this time around, there might be something else, too.”

Lesley was too cautious to stay much longer, but she did come away with what she wanted: an open door. Time yet to walk in or out of it. No guarantees on either end, and she had no certainty he could give her either her face or her reality back. But she was pretty sure about the face, and she wasn’t sure anymore that was the reality she wanted.

It wasn’t so different from what she’d had before Skygarden fell, now she thought of it.

Lost in thought, she forgot to come around by the Folly’s front entrance and only remembered when she tried and failed to open the coachhouse door that Nightingale had never offered her keys. She’d just heaved a sigh of frustration and turned around to retrace her steps when the door opened after all. Inside stood Nightingale herself, as close to dressed down as she got in a knit pencil skirt and open-necked blouse. “Oh—sorry,” Lesley said, then wondered what she was apologizing for. “Were you—”

Nightingale glanced back at the television, which was showing—of course—a rugby game. Lesley’d wondered if her tastes ran to less manly pursuits in this timeline, but apparently the attractions of the sport defied dimensions and gender stereotypes. She still couldn’t see the appeal, to be honest. “Ah,” Nightingale said, rubbing the back of her neck in evident embarrassment. “Peter’s out, chasing up a lead on County Gard for counter-terrorism. Not that we expect it to go anywhere. Do come in.”

The rugby was a good explanation. Lesley was almost certain it was the truth, and that Nightingale hadn’t been watching the tracker with an eagle-eye, suspicious at how long Lesley was loitering in one location. She’d probably gotten away with it this time. Still. No guarantees.

There was an awkward moment while Nightingale hovered, clearly wanting to go back to her beer and the match. Lesley offered what she hoped passed for a casual, friendly nod and headed back for the main building, but she paused when Nightingale called her name.

“I wanted you to know,” she said, still far more awkwardly than she usually did anything. “I haven’t given up on finding a way to send you home.”

Lesley hadn’t expected that.

“I haven’t found any new avenues of research yet,” she added, “and I fear that if I do, it’s the sort of project that will take many months, or even years. But I don’t intend to stop looking.”

“Thanks,” Lesley said. She pushed away the uncharitable thought that Nightingale would probably be happy to make her someone else’s problem again. “You’ll let me know if you do find anything?”

“I can make no promises, but the moment a solid lead comes up, you’ll be the first to know.”

Lesley really wished she could find that comforting.

_***_

“It’s a pity you can’t remove this,” said the Faceless Man the next time they met, frowning at the bracelet on Lesley’s wrist. Or she assumed he was frowning. Hard to tell. “Might I examine it more closely?”

She really didn’t want him to get anywhere near her, but she also wanted him in a better mood, because today she had demands to make. “No touching,” she warned, lifting her arm.

“Or you’ll end me, yes, I do remember.”

“Lay a finger on the bracelet, and I won’t have to. Nightingale will take care of that.”

He did actually pause at that, his outstretched hand stopping just short of the metal. _Hah_ , she thought. _So she does make you nervous._ “Is it that sensitive?”

“That’s what she said,” she lied. “Don’t try any magic directly on it, either.”

His fingertips ran through the air above the bracelet, and he bent down close to it, presumably feeling for _vestigia_. “Interesting. I admit I hadn’t begun to truly explore the full potential of magical metallurgy until very recently.”

“You mean demon traps?”

He straightened, waving his hand dismissively. “Oh, those. Charming enough, and certainly useful, but no—I’m speaking of a more refined process before. A process, in fact, which relates directly to the little problem I think you can help me with.”

“Happy to talk about that. We never finished setting terms, though.”

“Your face, and the possibility of return to your original dimension, are insufficient?”

“Not quite. You have to promise to leave Peter out of it.”

“Of course,” he said. “I should have expected something of the sort. What, precisely, do you mean by ‘out of it’?”

“I mean he doesn’t get hurt. At all. He’s stupid, he’ll find a way to put himself in the middle of whatever shit’s going down, but you’ll have to figure out a way to do whatever it is you’re doing without any of that shit landing on him. If it does, I’m out. You can try to summon Punch on your own.”

“Very well. I’ll do my best to save Constable Grant from himself.”

“Good,” said Lesley, feeling more relieved than she’d expected, given this had worked once before. “Then I’m in.”

“I notice you make no such stipulation for Nightingale.”

It hadn’t occurred to her to ask, either time around. She didn’t want Nightingale dead. She didn’t want _anyone_ dead. She was realistic, though. Nightingale and the Faceless Man had been on this trajectory from the beginning, and to be honest, Lesley wasn’t sure which of them she’d back if it came down to it. Best case scenario, she could set it up so Nightingale would take him out just as soon as his grand plan was enacted and Lesley had everything she needed. “I’m not going to be party to murder,” she said. “And I’d really rather keep the collateral damage to a minimum. But if she walks in, eyes open, she has to know what’s waiting for her.”

“Oh, I think I might have one or two things up my sleeve that she doesn’t know about, but we’ll learn that in time. For now, there are some tests I would like to run.” She didn’t like the sound of that. “Nothing invasive. I just want to try your hypothesis that this affinity you claim is something I can use.”

 _He’s in my head. Doesn’t get any more invasive than that_ , she wanted to say, but instead she sat very still as the Faceless Man moved around his stupid supervillain hideout, doing arcane things with spells several orders higher than anything she’d ever tried. The place felt emptier and more echo-y this time around. She suspected he’d taken the opportunity to clear out anything he really didn’t want her, or more to the point Nightingale, to know about. But there were still odd soap-film spots around the edges of the shaft, where she was pretty sure he was keeping up some kind of illusion, and more than once he’d warned her not to go wandering off on her own.

“What’s that one?” she asked, when she’d started to get properly bored.

“Hmm?”

“That spell. I don’t recognize all the _formae_.”

“This,” he said, producing it for her again, “is something along the lines of a divining rod, with the notable difference that it does actually work. I’m trying to ascertain whether you appear to be drawing on any external powers, or whether they appear to be drawing on you.”

“And are they?”

“Inconclusive so far. The last time we made this agreement, didn’t I do anything like this?”

“If you did, I didn’t know about it,” said Lesley. “You were the one who approached me, not the other way around.” He made a little _hmm_ and continued his work. The metallic tang of his magic left a coppery taste in her mouth. “Show me that one again?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You were teaching me,” she said. Not much, because he’d been worried Nightingale would start to recognize his influence on her _signare_ , but she’d learned some interesting tricks that either Nightingale hadn’t ever learned himself, or he just hadn’t deigned to show Lesley yet. “That was part of the deal.”

“I’ve never taken an apprentice before.”

“What about the other Little Crocodiles?”

“I certainly never bothered to keep up with the younger generation,” he said, stopping work to actually look at her. “And for most, it was an informal arrangement. No obligation on either side, and certainly no long-term commitment. Is that what you want?”

“I want to learn,” Lesley said. Magic was what she had now, for better or worse. Even if she got her face back permanently, it wouldn’t give her her _life_ back. Not the way she’d planned it out. “And I think you could use someone reliable, couldn’t you?” She didn’t want a permanent alliance, but he—the other version—had said it would be months at least before the time was right to summon Punch. No point in wasting all that time. Besides, it would be easier to take him down after she’d got what she wanted if she was playing with a few cards out of his own deck. Not that she’d decided that was her endgame, but better to keep the possibility in mind.

“You make a fair point,” he said. “I’ll consider it. Along with your the rest of your terms.”

“Peter’s non-negotiable.”

“Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear. Now hold still.”

This time she was fairly sure she’d caught the shape of the _forma_. If it was Nightingale, she’d have asked him—her—to repeat it at least once or twice more, but probably best not to push her luck. And anyway, she’d managed _lux_ off five minutes of Peter’s inadvertent instruction.

Just when she was thinking that, something in his spell snagged at the back of her mind, like a comb in tangled hair. And then she heard it, clear as day: harsh laughter, the roar of the crowd, and the clear, sweet ring of a bell.

“Fuck,” she said, when it had faded.

“Oh, yes,” said the Faceless Man, not noticing or cheerfully ignoring the fact that she was a hairs-breadth from toppling over. “I can work with this.”

“Great,” Lesley managed. “Good for you. Do we have a deal?”

“Hmm?”

“A deal,” she repeated, backing away from him. “You get to use me for your ritual, and I try to keep Nightingale off your back in the meantime. I get Punch dead, my face back, and to borrow some of that energy you plan on releasing. And Peter—”

“Constable Grant will remain unharmed. Yes, we have a deal.” He extended one hand. She steeled herself, then took it.

“All right,” she said, “that’s enough for tonight.”

“Better places to be?”

There were, actually. Molly was doing cider venison for dinner. No sardines tonight. “Don’t want Nightingale getting suspicious.”

“Certainly not,” said the Faceless Man. “I think I have enough to be getting on with for a few days, but I’d like to see you again later this week to consider next steps. Shall we say this Friday, at six pm?”

“Just how I want to spend a Friday evening.”

“I do have a day job, you know.”

She hadn’t been sure of that, actually. “Friday,” Lesley said. “Fine. I’m looking forward to it.”

The other thing she had to look forward to on Friday was another MRI, to see if the extremely limited amounts of magic she’d been allowed had caused any new damage over the last two weeks. They hadn’t, as she expected—she’d been exceeding her daily maximum pretty much since the beginning of her apprenticeship, and no harm done. Not that she told Dr. Walid that.

Afterward, she asked him to set her up with a surgical consult. Might as well keep the reconstruction moving along, since she was still stuck here, and her face wasn’t going to happen tomorrow. When all that was arranged, Walid opened his office door to let Nightingale back in. She’d had to come along to remove the bracelet, since that much metal tended not to play nicely with large magnets. “Any progress?” she asked.

“Patient confidentiality still applies,” said Walid.

“Abdul—”

But he was firm. “Peter’s signed a disclosure form. She hasn’t yet. Unless you do take her on as your apprentice, it’s Lesley’s call.”

Nightingale was irritated, but she did turn to Lesley, waiting. Lesley did not roll her eyes. “It’s fine.”

“No progress,” Walid confirmed. “I’d be comfortable allowing another twenty minutes of practice every day, as long I see her on a weekly basis.”

Nightingale nodded. Lesley sighed and stuck out her hand for the bracelet.

Nightingale quirked her eyebrows. “I don’t think that’s necessary, do you?”

“Really?” Lesley said, forgetting her excellent and longstanding rule about not questioning unexpected breaks from superior officers. “You mean it?”

“I do, provided you keep scrupulously to Abdul’s restrictions. I’ve spoken to the Commissioner and to Inspector Seawoll. You have an appointment to take your oath as an apprentice on Monday morning, if you’re willing.”

“Yes,” Lesley said without thought, “I’m willing.”

“Very good,” Nightingale said crisply, extending her hand to take the one Lesley had left hovering in midair. It was softer and slimmer than Lesley remembered from the only other time she’d shaken it, on pretty much the same occasion. The firmness of the grip was the same.

As they walked back to the Folly, Lesley asked, “Does Peter know?”

Nightingale smiled. “I thought you might like to be the one to tell him.”

Peter was on the phone with Bromley MIT when they got back, from the sound of it getting an earful about the complete lack of progress in the Patrick Mulkern murder. “Cheer up,” Lesley said, once he’d hung up. “Starting Thursday, you’ll only have to take half the bollockings.” And she held up her arm, showing off her bare wrist.

Peter looked from her to Nightingale. “Seriously?” He sounded as surprised as Lesley’d been.

“Seriously,” Nightingale confirmed, gravely. “Though I regret to inform you you won’t see a similar reduction in Latin practice.”

“Can’t have everything.” Peter wasn’t even trying to hide his grin. “Wish I could say that means we need to celebrate, but I don’t think I’ll be out from under this paperwork anytime soon.”

“Sorry,” said Lesley. “I can’t help. Still on leave, you know.”

“Well, come out to the tech cave and keep me company. We can put something on the TV and you can lord my misery over me.”

“Is Caroline coming again?”

“You know I’d really rather you mentioned it to me when she drops by,” said Nightingale, as though this was an ongoing source of frustration. “It saves me the embarrassment of Helena knowing more about what goes on here than I do.”

“That’s her mum, right?” Lesley asked, to Nightingale’s surprise.

“Yes, but you must know that, if you’ve lived here any length of time. She’s our most frequent guest.”

“We don’t _have_ guests,” said Lesley. “Unless you count Zach, but those were special circumstances, and mostly Peter’s fault. And Dr. Walid for dinner, once or twice. Definitely no other practitioners.”

“Really,” said Nightingale. She looked genuinely thrown by this.

“As far as I knew until I arrived here,” Lesley said, “there were no other British practitioners, except the Little Crocodiles, and you only just found out about those. You had this whole thing about it. Last practicing wizard in England.”

Nightingale frowned, then said slowly, “I will admit, prior to my first meeting with Lady Helena, it seemed as though we were all heading in that direction. Then she moved back to London in the ‘sixties and came knocking at my door. It was—an enlightening conversation.” Her frown turned rueful. “More on my side of it than hers, I admit. I’d never been told there was a feminine magical lineage.” Lesley would have loved to hear more, and Peter was clearly holding his breath for the same, but Nightingale’s eyes sharpened. “You say you’ve never met Lady Helena.”

“As far as I know,” Lesley said, “you don’t even know she exists.”

Nightingale nodded. “Intriguing. I’ll have to give that some thought.” And, without further clarification, she disappeared into the depths of the Folly.

Lesley looked to Peter, who shrugged. “Tech cave? I’ll let you pick the channel.”

“Nah,” said Lesley. “Want a walk this afternoon, and in the meantime, I’m off to the lab for some unsupervised practice, because I can now.”

“Be careful not to—”

“Oh my _God_ ,” she said, “you’re worse than Walid.”

It was incredibly satisfying just to do magic without anyone hanging over her shoulder. She spent thirty minutes on some basic drills and logged it as twenty. Then, out of curiosity, she tried _virgula_ , the _forma_ for the divining rod the Faceless Man had used in his spell. She gave it a few tries, and soon the shape of it felt almost right, almost solid. She’d be meeting him again today. Maybe she could get him to repeat it.

She’d been concentrating too hard to pay the attention she should have to her surroundings. A sound made her look up in alarm, the _forma_ dissolving even before she realized it was Nightingale standing in the doorway.

Lesley cleared her throat. “Ah—you startled me.”

“My apologies,” Nightingale said. Lesley couldn’t tell how long she’d been watching. “I think you’ve reached your limit, haven’t you?”

At least that was something she could look vaguely guilty about without it being suspicious. “Probably. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Don’t overdo it,” she said, automatic, and it was so familiar Lesley could have cried. Or screamed.

“I’ll be careful. Is that all you wanted, ma’am?”

Nightingale looked like she’d actually forgotten why she’d come down there in the first place. Then she pulled herself together. “I wanted to ask if you’d be here for supper tonight. Our conversation reminded me I haven’t spoken to Lady Helena in some weeks. I thought I might introduce you. Say, at seven o’clock?”

“I’ll be here,” she said cautiously, “but I don’t usually eat around people.”

Nightingale gave the faintest smile. “You needn’t worry about Helena’s reaction. Not, I should add, because of her innate good manners, but she’s accustomed to all manner of injuries. As long as you’re comfortable, of course.”

“Why not.” It’d give her an excuse to cut things short with the Faceless Man, if she needed one.

Nightingale nodded, hesitating as though she was thinking of saying something else. But then she just left without another word.

Lesley let out an explosive breath and sagged into one of the lab stools. She couldn’t let herself be that careless. Approved forms and wisdoms only in the Folly from now on. She’d save everything else for the Faceless Man’s lair.

Faceless himself wasn’t pleased to hear her time was so limited (“I didn’t spend half an hour searching for parking just to leave as soon as I got here, you know.”), but her bare wrist cheered him right up. “That does simplify things,” he said, “though it’s a pity you couldn’t bring it for further examination.” Instead he took the opportunity for further examination of Lesley herself, while she thought about the fact that he’d driven in from work and parked in the area. She wondered if she could get her hands on the relevant CCTV footage without cluing Peter or Nightingale in on what she was doing. She didn’t want him arrested, not for a while, anyway. But she was still police, and she wanted to know.

“What exactly are you testing for now?”

“The precise depth and nature of your affinity,” he said, snapping his fingers so the _formae_ surrounding her dissolved. Just as well. They’d been giving her a headache. “Not just with Mr. Punch, but with other elements of the ritual I have in mind.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. “Elements like what?”

“How familiar are you with the legend of Arthur?”

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she said, when she realized he was serious.

“Not at all. I don’t mean any actual historical figure, of course—I’ve no idea if the man ever existed. In fact, I’d be surprised if he did in any way we would recognize today, any more than Punchinello breathed and walked the earth. But the legend exists, and it’s the power of legend that concerns us. Now.” He actually bounced on the balls of his feet before striding eagerly toward one side of the shaft, opposite the foot of the staircase. “Come here and put out your hand. I was hesitant to try this while you still had that bracelet on.”

Lesley came over to join him and looked at the section of wall he’d pointed out. The cement surface swam when she looked at it too directly, but she put her hand out and even let him take her by the wrist to guide it.

“There,” he said, “close your fist.”

She did. It fastened around a long, round object that settled heavy in her hand.

“Now pull.”

The sword came away cleanly, but she was so surprised to find herself holding a _sword_ that she nearly dropped it. It sang in her hand, almost like the sound drawn swords make in movies even if they don’t in real life, almost like the distant echoes of a tolling bell. “Shit,” Lesley said, “you really are serious. Where did you find this thing?”

He was laughing like a stage musician delighted with both his trick and his audience. “Now that would be telling! You’ve performed magnificently, my dear. Can you hear that?”

“This isn’t Excalibur,” Lesley said, more to convince herself than anything else. “That’s not real.”

“Who’s to say whether it is or isn’t? Lean your ear in close—listen to it. It recognizes you. Like calls to like.”

That had been in the passage Postmartin had translated, the one speculating on inter-dimensional travel. _Like calls to like_. Lesley was just shaking the echo out of her head—or maybe that was just the sword—when the Faceless Man stiffened, turned, and was knocked flat on his face by a lightning bolt from above.

Nightingale had timed it well, for a moment of his complete absorption. Faceless gasped for breath against the floor, then tried to push himself and start a spell, but an invisible hand shoved him back into the cement. He’d gone down hard. That kind of pain made it difficult to cast.

“ _You_ , don’t move,” came Nightingale’s voice, as sharp and commanding as Lesley had ever heard it. “May, toss the sword as far as you can, away from him.” It went clanking into the corner. She heard the Faceless Man make a noise of protest, but it was mostly a groan. “Now turn toward the wall. Hands where I can see them.”

Lesley obeyed. She couldn’t do anything else. She felt her heart beating in her stomach, in her ears—it was all over, all over _again_ , she’d screwed it all up twice and nothing to show for it.

From above, she heard measured footsteps on the spiral stairs. “In case you’re wondering,” Nightingale said, drawing closer, “I do have backup. They’re just waiting for the word. But I think I might need a word or two of my own before we call them in.” Then the footsteps stopped. Those soft, expensive loafers of hers didn’t make a sound on the bare cement floor, but the jangle of metal did—she’d brought at least one pair of handcuffs. “Now your hands behind your back, both of you.”

She was going to cuff the Faceless Man first. Lesley would’ve done the same. Except as Nightingale approached, he turned his head just enough to lift his eyes from the ground. Lesley felt his _formae_ gathering, then saw his head slam back into the floor as Nightingale’s shield went up fast, always so fast, and it would have been fast enough, too—except it wasn’t Nightingale he was aiming at.

Lesley sprawled sidewards toward the perimeter of the shaft, falling right through another one of those illusions. She landed on her hands and knees, scraping them on something ridged and metallic. The illusion spell dissolved, and she looked up at the wall behind it. Just a cement wall. Absolutely nothing to hide.

Then she glanced down and got her first look at the thing she’d landed on.

Nightingale hadn’t waited on Lesley’s little digression, and behind her there was a serious magical fight gearing up. In the time it took Lesley to pull in a panicked breath, two fireballs had passed somewhere over her head, but that wasn’t what frightened her. “Inspector!” she called, as urgently as she could. It was _not_ a scream, she was far too professional for that, but there must have been something in her voice to cut through everything else going on, because Nightingale paused and actually turned to look at her.

The Faceless Man took advantage of her distraction to attack Lesley again. Nothing fancy—just the solid kick of your basic _impello palma_. But then, he didn’t need anything fancy, because he’d put Lesley straight on top of a demon trap.

There wasn’t anything she could do. The spell hit her in the chest and she went rolling off the wide embossed surface of the trap, releasing the secondary trigger. She felt it go. She also felt the precision twist of Nightingale’s magic doing something complicated and desperate and, Lesley was certain, far too late. She threw her arms up over her head, pressed her face to the cold, gritty floor, and waited for the world to end.

The magical concussion struck first. She remembered the roiling horror of the trap in Shakespeare Tower, the concentrated _vestigia_ of blood and fear and a protracted, painful death. But that release had been slow and controlled, and this was anything but. She might have actually lost consciousness this time, she couldn’t say for certain afterward. Before the magic started to dissipate, the actual, physical explosion hit. For a while everything was sound and terror.

It took Lesley an embarrassingly long time to decide she wasn’t dead. Moving her limbs cautiously, she realized she wasn’t even badly injured. Nothing felt worse than scrapes and bruises. More importantly, she _could_ move.

Very slowly, she lifted her head. It was pitch black, and the air tasted of dust. The echoes of the explosion had died, but she could hear the gravelly trickle of pulverized cement settling, and every so often the more alarming groan of something extremely heavy shifting above her.

She raised her head a little farther and came into contact with something smooth and flat that seemed to be resting immediately above her. It took her three tries to conjure a werelight. When she had, she turned until she could see an odd, translucent, shimmering surface that covered her from head to toe. As she squinted, a thin stream of concrete dust started to run down the other side of that surface, streaming over the length of Lesley’s body before it fell to the floor at her feet. She put one hand up to touch the underside of whatever it was and felt the hum of Nightingale’s _signare_ at work. A shield spell.

“Inspector?” she called again, then coughed.

Nightingale wasn’t dead either, couldn’t be if the shield was still up, but the seconds Lesley spent wondering if she was buried alone in an unmapped, underground shaft were some of the longest of her life. Then Nightingale said, from not very far away, “Did he escape?”

Lesley shifted, turning over on her back. “I don’t know.” He’d never have set off the trap like that if he hadn’t also laid an escape route. He liked redundancies.

Her hand went to her pocket to check her phone. She’d taken the battery out, so the magic shouldn’t have fried it, but a thumb swiped over the back told her it had been cracked almost in two. No chance there.

There was the faint sound of someone else stirring in the dark. It came from the same direction as Nightingale’s voice: “Are you hurt?”

“No.” Lesley swallowed. Her mouth felt like it was coated in chalk. If she looked straight up, she could see a tangle of metal where the staircase and the grilled platforms had fallen from above, all mixed in with concrete blocks and hovering queasily over her head. “Are you holding all of that up?”

“It seemed the most prudent course of action.”

“Can’t argue,” Lesley said.

Another pause. “I can’t see you,” Nightingale said, “but it would help a great deal if I could release your shield.”

“I think you’re all right to do that.”

“Stand by.”

Lesley braced herself, but all that happened when the spell dissolved was another shower of dust. Larger piles had settled around her, outlining the space where the shield had been, punctuated with actual chunks of concrete. She had a vague memory now of feeling, more than hearing or seeing, several heavy impacts immediately above her head. She had to close her eyes and breathe deeply for a minute. When she’d done that, she sat gingerly upright and made herself look around properly.

The shaft had caved in. There was really no getting around it. The dim, pathetic glow of her werelight revealed sections of curved wall that were riddled with cracks, and other sections that weren’t there at all. Lesley was sitting in a little pocket of space about two meters high, above which several tons of cement block and load-bearing beams hung suspended from nothing in particular. She’d be able to stand, but she doubted she could walk very far—the floor of the shaft was like an obstacle course, and she couldn’t see from one end to the other. She couldn’t find the foot of the stairs. She couldn’t find Nightingale, either. “Where are you?”

“What did you give him?”

“What?”

“The Faceless Man,” Nightingale said. “What did you give him?”

Lesley wanted to laugh. “I know I’ve got some explaining to do, but do you think we might want to leave that for DPS and whoever’s going to charge me for—whatever I’m going to be charged for? And focus on getting out of here instead? I hope you weren’t lying about the backup.”

“I wasn’t. I’m sure they’re busy at work on the surface. I’ll ask one last time: what did you give him?”

“Nothing,” Lesley said. “Nothing, yet. We were still working out an arrangement. I hadn’t decided what to do.”

Another long stretch of silence passed. Something shifted above them, and Lesley held her breath until it was still again.

“Very well,” Nightingale said. “First, we get you out of here.”

“I don’t suppose you could—I don’t know, shove all of this up a bit farther?” She really wanted to know _how_ Nightingale was doing it. Some variation on whatever spells let you rip a barn in half without getting brick dust on your nice suit, presumably. This version was a lot messier, but she supposed there’d been a demon trap to deal with. “Give us some room to work.”

“An excellent idea,” said Nightingale. Lesley got on her hands and knees and began to crawl, carefully, toward the sound of her voice. “Barring one potential problem.”

By the time she’d finished speaking, Lesley had carefully skirted the mess of fallen wall that lay between them. On the other side was Nightingale, lying flat on her back in a slate-grey trouser suit. She was pinned neatly under that same section of wall and metal platform. It couldn’t actually be resting on her, or she’d have been dead from the moment it fell. She must be holding it up along with everything else. Lesley scooted a bit closer and increased the intensity of her werelight.

“Shit,” she said.

Nightingale let out an alarming wheezing sound. She was clearly trying very hard not to laugh. “Well, yes.”

“Cut it a bit close, didn’t you?”

“I had a lot on my mind,” said Nightingale, rather testily for someone in her position, Lesley thought. Her usual neat chignon was unraveling, the strands tacky with dust and sweat. “If you aren’t planning to kill me, you might make a damage assessment.”

Lesley bit her lip and ran her hand carefully into the gap between fabric and cement. Nightingale’s suit jacket hung open, and the silk of her blouse felt intact, but the high woolen waist of her trousers was damp with something that had to be blood. Lesley felt her way toward the source and recoiled when her hand brushed the sharp metal edge of the grilled platform, just under Nightingale’s bottom rib. She could feel where it entered the wound. She had to turn her head away and breathe for a minute, reminding herself that she’d dealt with worse in her time. But that just made her think of the Coopertown baby, which didn’t help. _Shit, shit, shit._

“I’m not actually sure it’s that bad,” said Nightingale.

Lesley let out a bark of laughter. It wanted to turn into an endless, helpless peal of giggles. She clapped a hand over her mouth.

Nightingale frowned at her. “That’s not a stiff upper lip speaking. I can’t feel how deep it goes—can you tell?”

She groped around a little more, reflecting that DPS would have to add feeling up her boss to her growing list of workplace ethics violations. “No,” she said at last. “Could be half a centimeter. Could be deeper.”

“Abdomen wounds are tricky,” said Nightingale, for all the world as though they were back in the library discussing noun declensions. “You can do quite well with a knife through your gut, up until the point when you can’t.”

“Very helpful, ma’am.”

“I feel perfectly well. Some minor discomfort, but no dizziness or shortness of breath. The question,” Nightingale went on, “is whether, when I attempt to shift this mess, we’ll find the wound is superficial, or I’ll begin to bleed out and drop the whole lot down on our heads.”

What Peter would call a suboptimal outcome. “Do you think I could hold it up if you show me how?”

“I doubt it. No offense intended.”

“None taken.”

“Unless, of course, your extracurricular lessons have taught you more control than your practice sessions would indicate.”

“Is that how you knew?” Lesley asked, quietly. “It was the spell I did this afternoon, wasn’t it.”

“ _Virgula_? Yes. The _forma_ was imperfect, but I could tell you didn’t learn that from me, not in any incarnation.” She closed her eyes and drew air in through flared nostrils. “I hoped I was wrong.”

“Stupid.” Lesley hadn’t meant to say it aloud. Nightingale gave a tiny huff of agreement. Lesley’d meant herself, but there was no telling how Nightingale had taken it. “So you came after me. With what kind of backup?”

“I didn’t survive this long without a healthy sense of self-preservation. Lady Helena is at the door, and Frank Caffrey is in a van outside with half a dozen of his men. Hopefully by now they’ve called in emergency services.”

“Hang on,” said Lesley. She’d found a handkerchief in one of Nightingale’s pockets and was trying to pack it around the wound. “You didn’t bring in a full team? An official one, I mean.”

“I told you, I was hoping I was wrong. Or, failing that, that I’d buy myself some time to determine your level of involvement and decide on the appropriate response.”

Lesley exploded. “And that is the _problem_! You can’t just take or leave the law as it suits you, like the rivers do. You wave around your warrant card one minute and shrug off Nicky’s revenge killing the next. You can’t have it both ways. At least _he’s_ fucking honest about what he’s doing.” Lesley couldn’t breathe. She scrabbled at the velcro of her mask and ripped it off.

Nightingale’s face had already been pale in the werelight, but now it was stark white. Lesley swore under her breath, leaned back in, and put pressure on the wound.

“Is that why you dislike me so much?” Nightingale asked after a moment. “Don’t misunderstand me, nobody goes into this line of work out of a desperate need to be liked. Least of all a woman in the mid-twentieth century. But I wouldn’t have expected to choose an apprentice who bore me so much active resentment.”

“You didn’t choose me,” said Lesley. “Not like Peter. But I lost my face, and picked up some magic, and you didn’t really have any choice.” She sat back on her heels. “I don’t dislike you. Not really.” Not more than anyone else. It was just that sometimes she hated everyone, and Nightingale was convenient, and she couldn’t _let_ herself like Nightingale too much once she’d decided to cut a deal. “I don’t think the sun shines out of your arse, like Peter does.”

“I’ve disappointed Peter.” There was a clammy sheen on her forehead that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago. “Any number of times.”

“Never seems to stick, does it.”

“He’s very forgiving,” said Nightingale. “I suppose you were counting on that.”

“What I said about disliking you?” said Lesley. “Changed my mind.”

Appallingly, that prompted one of Nightingale’s trademark grins. It didn’t last long, but even more appallingly, the familiar sight was the first thing to make Lesley feel like they might, just possibly, get out of this.

She reconsidered that a moment later, watching Nightingale take a careful breath. Whatever she’d said, she was feeling this. “I suppose I can’t speak for any other iteration of myself,” she said. “But I can’t imagine what could persuade me to take on an apprentice against my will. If he did that, it wasn’t because he couldn’t think of anything better to do with you.”

Which might have been damning with faint praise, but Lesley didn’t think so. She was saved having to come up with something to say when Nightingale’s eyes closed again and a long shudder ran through the meters of cement and steel above them.

“Shit, shit!” The ceiling groaned. Lesley ducked her head, like that would do any good. “Focus, will you?”

The shaft stabilized, and the groaning faded. The heart-pounding terror, not so much. Nightingale cleared her throat. “I’d forgotten how infuriating it is to hear that from the other end.”

“Too bad,” said Lesley, grimly. “I don’t know how long it’ll take someone to dig us out of here, but you’re sticking with me until they do. Eyes open.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Nightingale cast them to the far side of the room. “I wonder if we’re taking the wrong approach. If he had an exit strategy, you might be able to make use of it.”

“While you have a nice lie-down?”

“I can hold out a while longer.”

“Do me a favor,” said Lesley. The fabric under her hand was completely soaked through. “You don’t have a second handkerchief in another pocket, I suppose.”

Nightingale considered this. “No,” she said, “but I do have my mobile.”

“You _what_?”

“Would you believe I forgot I was carrying it?”

“I would,” said Lesley. “That’s the sad part.” A bit of fumbling got her a Nokia modified with a battery interrupt, clearly courtesy of Peter Grant. “I’m going to have to move as far away from you as I can, or you’ll blow it right out.”

“Understood. I’m expending as little effort as possible.”

“You just keep on doing that. Try to keep pressure on the wound while you’re at it.” Lesley scooted away on her buttocks. Very dignified. When she’d reached the safest distance she could manage, she thumbed the phone on, praying they were close enough to the station to have service.

“Try Helena first,” Nightingale called. “She’s number six on speed-dial.”

Lesley didn’t have time to be impressed that Nightingale knew what speed-dial was, or that she had at least six numbers programmed into it. She hit the button and put it on speaker.

“What in God’s name happened?” said a female voice, almost before it had rung.

“Helena,” Nightingale said, urgently. “Did anyone come out through the fire exit?”

“No.” Nightingale sighed, but whether in relief or disappointment, Lesley couldn’t tell. “And nobody’s going in that way, either, until these gentlemen in the yellow helmets have shifted quite a lot of rubble. Where are you?”

“At the bottom of the rubble.”

“That’s damned inconvenient.”

“Indeed.”

“While you two are busy exchanging understatements,” said Lesley, “we’re running out of time. Is there an officer at the scene?”

“Any number of them,” said Lady Helena’s voice, “including that apprentice of yours, Thomasina. Is that the other one I hear?”

“I’d hoped to keep Peter out of this,” said Nightingale.

“They’ll have felt that demon trap from here to Greenwich. He was here before the hard hats arrived.”

“Put him on, will you?” Lesley said.

There was some shuffling around. “Fuck,” said Peter. “Are you okay?”

Lesley summarized the situation to dead, panicky silence on Peter’s end. The report steadied her, and she started to think properly, to come up with solutions. “I’ve been down here before,” she said. “It’s just adjacent to another shaft, an actual Crossworks one, at the end of Dean Street. Get someone from BTP. Jaget or someone. They’ll be able to find it.”

“And, what, blow their way in from that end?”

“I don’t know!” Lesley yelled. “Let them figure that out. Only they’d better do it quickly.”

“Right,” said Peter, “right,” and went to light a fire under the Transport Police.

Tense silence for a few minutes. Then Lady Helena came back on. “Thomasina? Peter says you’re injured.”

“Nothing to be done about that until there’s a route in,” said Nightingale, “but I’d like you on standby. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Not at all, but you owe me.”

“We can work out terms later.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” said Lady Helena.

Lesley had been eyeing the battery bar. Thirty percent. “I think we’d better hang up and save power,” she said. “Unless you have anything useful to suggest?” Lady Helena did not. Lesley ended the call.

“I think you’d better let your werelight go, as well,” said Nightingale. “You’ve drastically exceeded your allotted time for the day.”

“That limit’s way too low,” Lesley said, but she let the light wink out as soon as she’d crawled back to Nightingale’s side, leaving the phone where it was. She sat there in the dark with her hand back over the handkerchief, trying not to cough on the stale air and straining her ears for the sound of Nightingale’s breathing. Eventually she couldn’t take the silence anymore. “You still with me?”

“You’d know if I wasn’t.”

True but unhelpful. “I don’t want you drifting off. Why don’t you keep talking?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“Tell me about Ettersberg,” said Lesley, before she knew what was going to come out of her mouth.

She was glad she couldn’t see Nightingale’s face. “We really must work on your bedside manner.”

“I’m not trying to be cheerful. I’m trying to keep you awake.”

“I take your point,” said Nightingale, before slowly, painfully coming out with it.

The Folly had made ready enough use of her during the war, once she’d come inescapably to their attention during the Blitz. That didn’t mean she’d really been part of the Folly. She wasn’t supposed to know why they were raiding Ettersberg in the first place. “But David told me.”

“David Mellenby?”

“Yes. I knew him through my brother.”

Something in her tone made Lesley wonder. “Were you two—”

“No,” said Nightingale decisively. Then her voice softened. “We did talk about marriage, once. For the look of it. But neither of us wanted to live that particular sort of lie. Though, all things being equal, it might have been a different story in the reality you came from.” Which might have answered several other questions Lesley wouldn’t ever have dared ask, but Nightingale moved right on. To Operation Spatchcock, the prisoners, and the research data. “I objected. Strenuously. You can imagine how much weight that was given. Perhaps my counterpart fared better.”

“He doesn’t talk about it.”

“No.” She was fading.

“So,” Lesley pressed on, ruthless. “What happened?”

What happened was a bloodbath, the extraction of the files, and the death of British wizardry. Nightingale talked herself hoarse, less like the words had been waiting to pour out and more like she’d just forgotten she could stop herself. When at length she trailed off, there was a catch in her voice that might have been tears or might have been her strength giving out at last.

Lesley had to keep the witness talking, so she blurted out the next question that came to mind. “What did you do with the files?”

The silence this time around had a very different quality. “If I were to tell you that,” said Nightingale, suddenly all sharp control, “what precisely would you do with the information?”

Wrong question.

Fortunately, that was when Nightingale’s phone rang.

“She’s still conscious?” asked Lady Helena over the sound of someone registering their extreme displeasure in the background.

“Yes,” said Lesley, crouched in the corner.

“Good,” said Lady Helena. “Peter’s providing a distraction so I can work. Get back to Thomasina, and both of you hold tight.” Lesley didn’t get the chance to ask. She found out when the wall blew in on a light breeze.

It smelled, oddly, of flowers.

They hadn’t actually brought in a demolition team, Lesley found out later. When BTP got down close enough, they found the Faceless Man’s exit route, which he’d cleared ahead of time between the two shafts. The demon trap had left it a mess, but not so much of one that Lady Helena’s magic hadn’t been able to burrow its way in while Peter held off the increasingly infuriated safety-qualified search team.

Lady Helena wore a borrowed yellow helmet and a collected expression. She looked old enough to be Nightingale’s mother, if Nightingale had been as old as _she_ looked. Her age didn’t stop her shouldering Lesley out of the way, but she did accept Lesley’s offer of a hand so she could get down on her knees. “Ouch,” she said. “That is going to hurt tomorrow.”

“Trade you,” said Nightingale.

Lady Helena laughed. “As for you,” she said to Lesley, “there are some nice paramedics back there who would like very much to check you over.”

“She’s holding up the roof—”

“And I suspect she can’t do that much longer, so put yourself out of harm’s way and let those of us who know what we’re doing sort this out.”

“Get on with you, May,” said Nightingale, so Lesley got.

There were, indeed, paramedics, who took her gently by the arm and started asking a lot of questions Lesley didn’t understand until she put a hand to her face and realized she’d left her mask off. “That’s old news,” she said, the weight of everything crashing in on her. “I’m fine.”

Not so fine that she wasn’t sitting under a shock blanket and taking the occasional whiff from an oxygen mask when Peter finally caught up to her. “Oh thank fuck,” he said. She let him crush her in his arms, because he really seemed to want to. Wrong face, wrong Lesley, none of it seemed to matter. She pressed her eyes against his shirt and pretended they weren’t leaking.

Both of them looked up at a quick flash of magic, something bright and powerful and definitely Nightingale. Then came the sound of heavy things falling. “Move _back_ ,” the nearest BTP officer kept saying, so they did, stumbling into the lift and eventually up to the surface where there were floodlights and emergency response vehicles.

“Seawoll’s around here somewhere,” Peter said, which was just perfect. His teeth were chattering. Lesley leaned into his side, which was how she felt his breath actually stop when they rolled the stretcher out onto the pavement.

Lady Helena walked out after of it on the arm of one of the BTP officers. She made a beeline for Lesley and Peter.

“I’ve stabilized her for the moment,” she said. “She wants a word with you, Constable Grant.”

Peter ran over to the ambulance, leaning in as Nightingale was loaded up. Lesley couldn’t hear what they were saying, but she saw Peter’s expression when he looked back at her.

“You’re off the Folly’s guest list,” said Lady Helena. “He’s been deputized to tell Molly.”

“Just what I need, a night in a custody suite.”

“Who said anything about a custody suite?” Lady Helena took off her helmet and ran her fingers through a short, greying bob. “You’re coming with me.”

Helena Linden-Limmer’s home was on the top floor of a sleek high-rise. Peter could probably have priced it to within a few thousand pounds, but Lesley just basked in the soft recessed lighting and state-of-the-art noise mitigation. She left her trainers on the mat in the entryway but still made a trail of cement dust through the hall.

“Shower’s through there,” said Lady Helena, handing her a towel. Lesley took that as her cue to turn her brain off for a while.

When it came back online, she was curled in an off-white loveseat, wearing borrowed pajamas and sipping a cup of tea that was so heavily doctored it made her eyes smart. Lady Helena moved around on the edges of her awareness, making phone calls and occasionally topping up Lesley’s tea. A white and chrome clock hung over the wall. It was past one in the morning.

Eventually Lady Helena settled into the armchair opposite her. “That’s better,” she said. “You look almost human.”

Lesley recoiled.

“Oh, I don’t mean _that_ , darling,” said Lady Helena, with a little laugh that wasn’t quite apologetic. “I meant the rest of it. Nobody’s at their best when they’ve been dragged backward through a tunnel collapse. More tea?”

Lesley shook her head.

“Kitchen’s that way if you change your mind. I’ve just been on the phone with Abdul Walid. They’ve taken Thomasina in for surgery. I’d hoped to avoid that, but I didn’t have time to heal her properly what with the walls caving in. Abdul will let us know when there’s word.”

“Heal her?”

“That’s what I do, darling,” said Lady Helena, “that’s my field, or was for many years. None of your vulgar hurling things about. I’ll leave that to the officers of the law, except in very special circumstances like tonight. She doesn’t like to put me in the action, you know—says it confuses things. Technically I am a civilian consultant.”

“In magic? I didn’t know we had those.”

“Yes, Caroline’s told me a bit of your situation,” Lady Helena said. “It’s all rather fascinating, though I can’t claim to understand the technical underpinnings of it. Not my area. When Thomasina rang me this afternoon, she said your version of the Folly was still calcified in its own masculinity, painfully unaware of the rest of the world. Though she put it differently.”

“She said you were the one who approached her.”

“I could not _believe_ the Folly’d taken her in, you see. My own mother—she was the one who trained me—offered to serve in the war effort, but they never gave her the time of day, so she left England for good. And two decades later, here in the middle of London, I found this sad, aging woman, left to pick up the pieces the old boy’s club had strewn around the country, but then that’s how men do it, you know. I say ‘aging’. I was a stunning young thing then, though you’d never believe it to look at me now, and as for Thomasina—well, how the tables do turn!” She laughed. “I was good for her, I think. Shock to the system. She started realizing there might be more to magic than she’d been told, looking outward a bit more. Though I never did shake her loose from the police. Would you believe, she tried to recruit one of my daughters?”

“No,” said Lesley, trying to imagine it of the Nightingale she’d known.

“I put my foot down there, of course. Said she was to keep her hands off my girls, though _my_ services, she could bargain for. That’s why she asked me by tonight.”

“As backup, she said.”

“No, that was a last-minute change in plans,” Lady Helena corrected her. “Like I told you, I have a specialty. Which reminds me, I was going to do this when we were both rested in the morning, but I think I feel my second wind coming on. Do you mind?” Without waiting for permission, she leaned across the coffee table and took Lesley’s face between her cool, soft palms.

Lesley was too tired and too shocked to object, and there was something calming about sitting there and submitting to this examination, so different from the Faceless Man’s. She let the scent of wax and flowers wash over her. Finally Lady Helena sighed and sat back. “Yes, I think it can be done.”

“Sorry, what?”

“I think I can restore your face, or some semblance of it,” said Lady Helena.

Lesley’d had her life turned upside-down a few too many times lately to be able to process this now. “I don’t understand.”

“That’s why she wanted to introduce us,” Lady Helena explained. “Wanted my initial assessment before she got your hopes up. I don’t think she really understands what I do, you know, and to be fair I’ve been cagey about its workings and limitations—a hard-learned lesson, but you don’t need to hear about the mistakes of my youth. Systemic illness is still beyond me, I’m afraid, but physical trauma? That, given time, I can generally manage.”

“You can fix my face.”

“I believe so. Can’t say for certain until we start, but at minimum I should be able to restore more of your function than those barbaric surgeons. It won’t be quick or easy—the work of weeks or months, I should think—and it won’t be painless. It may not look like you used to, so I can’t guarantee you’ll be satisfied with the result.”

“You think I’m satisfied as it is?”

“I’ll do it properly, though, whatever I can accomplish,” Lady Helena went on, as though Lesley hadn’t spoken. “You won’t need magic to keep it up when I’m done.”

Hope felt like a hollow pit in the middle of her stomach. “I may not have weeks or months. I’m probably looking at prison time.”

Lady Helena shrugged. “I make house calls.” She gave Lesley another assessing look. “All that aside, you’re dead on your feet, darling, and whatever favors Thomasina may ask I can’t keep the hounds of the Met at bay forever. Go to bed. I’m sure they’ll want all kinds of statements from you as soon as they’ve worked out where you are.”

***

When Lesley woke the next morning, she lay in the huge white guest bed and allowed herself not to think for a good long while.

Caroline was in the kitchen when she finally came out. She didn’t react visibly to Lesley’s face, so she must have been warned. “Peter sent me,” she told Lesley, “since Mum says he’s not allowed in for fear of explosions, and _you’re_ not allowed out except under her supervision. He says not to speak to anyone official until you’ve seen Nightingale.”

“Not sure that’s my call,” said Lesley.

“Anyway,” said Caroline, hopping off the bar stool and handing over a plastic bag that held a set of clean, folded clothing, “now I can tell him I’ve seen you and made his delivery, so my work here is done. Let’s all get drunk again soon, that was nice. My place, though. I’ve got better booze. And better couches. We can make Peter invite Beverley Brook this time and I can show you my rope trick.” Lesley didn’t _think_ that was a euphemism.

“Sure.” It did sound nice. Maybe they could try it in eight to twelve months with good behavior, if Lesley was lucky.

“Mum’s in the bath,” Caroline added on her way out. “She said you’re not to go anywhere, and if you try it she’s as capable of taking you out dripping wet and naked as she is fully clothed. But none of us want to see that, so please don’t.”

Lesley agreed she did not in fact want to see that. She did think long and hard about doing a runner anyway, but what Lady Helena had offered her was a better tether than any threat.

The bag of clothes also included a cheap mobile and a paper surgical mask, which was thoughtful. Lesley got dressed, made coffee on Lady Helena’s extremely expensive-looking machine, and ignored the texts from Peter that were piling up on the phone.

Lady Helena walked in, bob perfectly coiffed, and accepted an espresso as her due. “I see you’ve made yourself at home. Don’t get too comfortable. Charming as this is, I don’t think any of us wants you to be my problem for long.” Lesley thought she might not mind it, given the alternatives, but she didn’t say so. “When you’re quite ready, we have an appointment at UCH.”

She didn’t have to ask for directions when they got there, just guided Lesley to a private room that was already way more familiar than she wanted it to be. The door was ajar, and she could hear Nightingale from inside.

“I am pulling rank,” she was saying, in a surprisingly strong voice all things considered. “Not merely as your superior officer, but as your teacher. This is not your problem to solve, and the consequences are not yours to shoulder. Is that clearly understood?”

Peter replied, but not loudly enough for Lesley to catch the words.

“I’ll take that as good enough for now. And whether I stay in this bed is also not your decision to make, so please stop fussing.” That last bit sounded more aggrieved than commanding.

“Any time, darling,” said Lady Helena, and Lesley realized she’d been standing with her fist outstretched. When she knocked, Nightingale called for them to come in.

She was sitting up in bed, wearing a hospital gown and looking healthier than she had any right to. That was probably due to Lady Helena’s work. Peter’d been hovering nearby, but he snapped up straight when he saw Lesley. She wished she knew what he was thinking.

“Abdul says you’re discharging yourself,” said Lady Helena.

Nightingale nodded. “Would you advise against it?”

“I probably should, but having rooted around personally inside your abdomen I’m confident in your recovery. You see how much better this is when you call me in? Though I hope you intend to follow your discharge instructions.”

“Scrupulously,” said Nightingale.

Lady Helena looked skeptical, but in a way that said it wasn’t her problem. “Then the young lady is all yours, and I’ll be about my day.” To Lesley, she added, “I have some preparations to make, but I’ll be in touch to discuss next steps.” Peter only got a, “Good day, Constable.”

Peter waited until the door was closed. “Is it true? I want it from you.”

“Yeah,” said Lesley. “I had a deal with the Faceless Man. Pretty sure it’s off now, though.” She looked at Nightingale so she wouldn’t have to watch Peter take that in. “Are you arresting me personally?”

“Not dressed like this, I’m not,” said Nightingale. “Peter, leave us.”

“Ma’am—”

“Unless you want to watch me change out of this hospital gown,” she added. Peter left. Nightingale indicated the zippered suit bag draped over one of the chairs. “If you wouldn’t mind?”

Helping her into her clothes ought to have felt more awkward than it did, but Lesley had been on the wrong side of this kind of thing often enough after her injury, and Nightingale was so matter-of-fact that it wasn’t weirder than it had to be. Much. “You’ll need to give a statement today,” she said, pausing to pant for a while after they’d gotten both her arms in her blouse sleeves. “We need to decide what goes in it.”

“Ma’am?”

“There is, as DCI Seawoll will no doubt tell me, a great deal of shit about to hit the fan. From an operational perspective, last night was inexcusable. I acknowledge that, and I’m prepared to answer for being the only senior party involved when things went pear-shaped. The advantage my blunder gives us is that your involvement is not yet established in the official record.”

“You’re offering me an out,” Lesley said in disbelief.

“Nothing quite so simple,” Nightingale said. Even half dressed and short of breath, she looked dangerous. “You’ve run roughshod over my trust and Peter’s. The fact that I believe I understand your motives for doing so doesn’t excuse the betrayal.”

“Then why—”

“You also saved my life last night. And, as I said, I do understand your reasons.”

“So, what, don’t do it again?”

“Will you?” The direct question made Lesley pause in the act of shaking out Nightingale’s skirt. “Suppose Helena can’t repair your face and the Faceless Man comes knocking at your door again. What will you tell him this time?”

Instead of answering, Lesley asked, “How long did it take you to think of asking Lady Helena about my face?”

“Not long,” Nightingale said, “but at first I didn’t want to involve anyone outside the Folly until we’d established your bona fides. Then I simply assumed there was nothing she could do, if she hadn’t attempted it in your original reality. It wasn’t until I found out she’d never met you that I realized that might not be the case.” She finished the laborious process of doing up the buttons of her blouse and sat back, eyes falling closed. “My work, these last decades, has been a process of trial and error. In the middle of the last century I found myself in the position of keeping up a tradition from which I’d been deliberately excluded. Its last proponents turned to me because they’d needed me during the war, and because I was the only option they had left. I respected that tradition because it was all I knew, out of what Peter would no doubt call social conditioning, and because—as far as I could tell—it was what worked.”

“Do you still think that?”

“In some respects, certainly not. In others, yes, I do believe it served and continues to serve its purpose. But I admit there is a need for change.” She opened her eyes again, fixing them on Lesley. “Did Peter tell you he wasn’t the first apprentice I tried to take on?”

“No,” said Lesley, “but Lady Helena said you tried to recruit some of her daughters.”

Nightingale laughed, then put a hand to her side. “Not my brightest idea, I’ll confess. But there were other attempts. None of them quite caught on. The last was a few years before I met Peter. She was bright. Dedicated and interested, but in the end she was more interested in the usual sort of police work and put off by the threat of brain damage. I didn’t argue the point. She did continue to assist me with cases, though.”

“Was?”

“Died in May of last year,” Nightingale said, looking away. “In your stead, I believe.” She cleared her throat. “But by then I’d met Peter. I think, until I did, I had an odd idea it had to be a woman. That was probably Helena’s influence, though I don’t accept her notions of a specifically feminine magic. Perhaps it was my own particular form of much-delayed rebellion. Then he came along.”

“He’s not exactly in keeping with tradition, either, is he?”

Nightingale grinned. “That he is not, in many ways.” The grin faded. “He’s made the same point you did last night about the inconsistency of my approach. I won’t say he’s wrong, either. But I've been doing this longer than anyone I know. Call it my right, call it entitlement, but I’m not above exercising discretion when I see fit. I wonder if you’ll protest when that’s used to your advantage.”

Lesley sat down beside her on the bed. “What are you offering?”

“The bracelet again, for a start,” Nightingale said promptly. “Then I want every detail of every conversation you had with that man. I need to know what he intended with you, not to mention that sword. And you won’t be leaving the Folly without me for quite some time. I think we have a few things to prove to one another before extending more trust than that, don’t you?”

Lesley stared at the wall, thinking, until Nightingale got impatient and started to swing her legs over the side of the bed.

“Damn,” she said, allowing Lesley to help, “this doesn’t get any more enjoyable. Better than being shot, though.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“We can compare notes on the recovery process later.”

“Sounds fun,” said Lesley. “So, this deal you’re offering. Do we shake on it?”

Nightingale gave her a slow smile. “That’s a start.”

They let Peter and Dr. Walid in a few minutes later. Walid summoned a nurse to fetch a wheelchair, then shooed Peter and Lesley out of the room. They stood side-by-side in the corridor and didn’t look at one another.

“We’re going to have to make something up for Seawoll and DPS,” said Lesley.

“You’re going to have to make it up,” said Peter. “I wasn’t even there.”

“Bet you’re happy someone else can take the blame for the property damage this time.”

“I think I still come out ahead on that count.”

“Behind, Peter,” said Lesley. “Definitely behind.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him crack a smile. “We need to talk.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m getting that.” The nurse walked past them to bring in the wheelchair. Inside, Walid was still lecturing. They couldn’t hear what he was saying, but his accent sounded stronger than usual. Probably the stress. “Nightingale said you might get your face back.”

“Maybe.”

“You still going to try to fix your dimensional problem?”

It was hard to believe, but she’d almost forgotten about that. “Probably, if there’s a way. Sounds like it might take a while.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, her shoulder resting just beside his. “Might decide I’m better off here.”

“What about the other Lesley? Does she get a say in it?”

Lesley thought about herself, whole and undamaged, without the deep well of hate and resentment she’d discovered over the last year. “She can take care of herself.”

“I bet she can.” Walid’s monologue had finally wound to its close. Peter dropped his hand suggestively to his side. Lesley reached to take it in hers, and he gave her fingers a quick, tight squeeze before letting go. “Sounds like they've finished up,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”


End file.
